


Corvus cormax

by Donda



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Crack, Fluff, Gen, He just wants to be left alone to drive his car, Max is very confused by all this, Raven!Max
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2017-04-28
Packaged: 2018-05-24 23:20:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 26,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6170671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donda/pseuds/Donda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Max finds himself on the wrong end of a curse, and has to deal with life as a raven. </p><p>Based on <a href="http://icarus-doodles.tumblr.com">icarus-doodles</a>' raven!Max AU (<a href="http://icarus-doodles.tumblr.com/post/133039676357/i-had-a-dream-that-max-turned-into-a-raven-for">here</a> and <a href="http://icarus-doodles.tumblr.com/post/133050501947/some-more-furiosa-and-ravenmax-doodles-because-i">here</a>).</p><p>(Winner in the 2018 Mad Max Fanfic Awards of the Best Gen Long Fic category.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> (Because apparently I am easily swayed by awesome AU fanart.)
> 
> This is also based very slightly off of a Slovakian fairytale as collected by Pavol Dobšinský.
> 
> Thanks so much to everyone who voted for this fic in the Mad Max Fanfic awards!
> 
>   
>    
> 

Well, this was distressing.  
  
The first thing Max noticed was the dizzying state of his vision. The range was too wide, and things disappeared straight in front of him. He shook his head and blinked his eyes. It didn't help.  
  
The second thing he noticed was the feathers. Instead of his ratty clothes, all he saw as he looked down at himself were dusty, black feathers. He reached to touch them, and his arms wouldn't move quite right.  
  
Were those… Those were wings. He had wings.  
  
"Craa…?"  
  
Hm. That wasn't right.  
  
He looked down again, and lifted one clawed foot, then the other. He stretched his wings and examined them almost fearfully. Okay, so he was a bird now. Weird, but not the end of the world, he tried to convince himself, trying very hard not to panic at this point.  
  
He looked up at the old woman who had just a moment ago been spouting an array of fairytale-sounding curses at him. She was smiling now. This was all very confusing to Max. He wasn’t sure what he had done to offend her other than refuse to drive her around to whatever place it was she had asked about. He had never even heard of the place before, and he certainly wasn’t a taxi service to every wastelander who asked. He was a little rude, maybe, but he didn’t think that was quite worthy of being turned into a bird. Or maybe drugged with hallucinogens. That actually seemed like a more likely scenario right now, he realized.  
  
She laughed down at him, not cruelly, but genuinely amused. “Only your littlest sister can save you now, scav.”  
  
Max looked up at her like she was crazy and took a few steps back.  
  
“And good luck with that, loner that you are,” she chuckled, taking a step forward and easily negating Max’s scramble backward. “Seven days of silence,” she said like a warning, leaning down and giving him a tap on the beak. “That’ll be your freedom.”  
  
Max turned and half ran, half hopped, nearly tripping over his own feet just to get away. He glanced over his shoulder, but the woman wasn’t following. She watched him with a smirk, then turned and left. Max made his way back to his car, his legs shaking.  
  
He didn’t actually feel drugged. Everything was clear and stable, and he still felt like he had as much control of his mind as he ever did these days. It was just that he was a bird. He walked in slow circles around his camp, hoping to wake up from this weird dream. But dream or not, the best thing to do was to deal with the problem. Not that he knew how, but he couldn’t just wait around for it to somehow fix itself out here. As the sun beat down unusually harshly on his black feathers, he eyed the open window of his Interceptor.  
  
It turned out flying wasn’t as easy as birds made it look. It took him a while just to get off the ground, and even then, he rammed into the door more than a few times before he finally got himself up high enough to reach the window and stay up there without falling back to the ground. He opened his beak and panted in the heat, realizing his body wasn’t cooling the way his human body would. He peered in the side mirror, but found it uncomfortably strange to see a large raven staring back and mimicking all his movements, and he had to look away quickly.  
  
Eventually he accepted that he had to leave his Interceptor behind. It was a struggle to open his canteens for water, he couldn’t get to most of his supplies of food, and certainly couldn’t drive the car. Reluctantly, he flapped away, knowing he had a long flight ahead of him. He crashed to the ground more times than he would admit, but eventually got the hang of flying and made his way across the wastes.  
  
It was days later by the time he reached the Citadel, exhausted, hungry, and desperately thirsty. He nearly crash landed at the foot of the largest tower, where the water distribution tanks sat, free for anybody to use as they needed.  
  
He hopped under one of the tanks, hiding in the shadows, and eyed the spigot thirstily. He watched people come and go, filling jugs and bottles, but each was careful not to spill a drop. He had no way to turn on the spouts himself, and was beginning to lose hope that he’d be able to get water here when a girl approached, carrying a pail in each hand.  
  
He watched her fill one, and he inched forward slowly. She put the full bucket down and started filling the second one, and Max swooped in. He perched on the edge, quickly scooped some water into his beak, and tipped it back toward his throat. It wasn’t a particularly quick or satisfying way to drink, but he took in as much as he could, beakful by beakful until the girl finally finished filling the second pail and noticed him as she turned.  
  
“Hey! No! Get away!” She waved her arms and Max scrambled back with a startled caw. She continued after him until he flew up to the top of one of the tanks and perched, watching her cautiously. The girl eyed him just as cautiously, then picked up her pails of water and left. Max croaked to himself. That would have to be enough for now. Filling his stomach with water had helped his almost painful hunger some, but he knew it wouldn’t last, so he turned his attention to finding food, hopefully before he collapsed from exhaustion.  
  
Max could hardly fly anymore, worn out and weak with hunger, so he walked cautiously among the people at the foot of the Citadel (running or hopping away occasionally if someone made a move toward him), looking for something - anything - he could steal. He saw a number of people eating ration squares, or bowls of soup, or the occasional piece of fruit or vegetable, but they all kept their food close. Finally, as the sun sunk lower on the horizon, he found a man sitting on a rock, munching on what looked like some kind of biscuit, another one sitting on the rock beside him. Max snuck up behind him, snatched the second biscuit and hopped away like his life depended on it.  
  
He found a safe place to perch, and pecked at the biscuit hungrily. It was tough, and he ended up having to pin it down with one foot as he bit pieces off, but even that didn’t work very well. He learned quickly that big bites didn’t work, and attempting to chew his food just ended up with more food falling out of his beak than staying in it. He quickly pecked up the crumbs he had spilled everywhere, then took smaller bites off of the biscuit, ones that he could swallow down with minimal fuss.  
  
The biscuit was half gone by the time he finally felt his hunger subside, and he peered down at it, feeling a little guilty for stealing it from someone who certainly didn’t deserve to be stolen from. He picked up what was left and headed back toward where he had found it. The man was still sitting there, slouching, looking a little forlorn. Max carefully placed the half-biscuit next to him and hurried away again.  
  
He settled into the tight space under the water tanks again as the sun set, and his exhaustion quickly set in, dragging him into the depths of sleep within minutes.  
  
In the morning, a young boy took pity on him as Max eyed the water spigots again and stretched his sore wings. The boy scraped the last of his breakfast out of the bowl he was holding and stretched to reach the spigot, pouring a little bit of water in it and setting it down for Max. Max approached cautiously, well aware that it could be a trap to lure him within reach, but the boy crouched unmoving, watching with wonderment as Max started to drink, tipping mouthfuls of water down his throat until he finally felt satisfied. He gave the boy a nod in thanks, then flew up to the safety of the top of the water tanks. His wings hurt but he only had a little farther to fly. He turned to the spire across from him, took a deep breath, and leapt off the tank. He had no idea what he was going to do. He just didn’t know where else to go.


	2. Chapter 2

He found her in one of the repair bays, both hands, flesh and metal alike, smeared with grease and oil as she dug into the inner workings of a truck. He perched on the fender beside her as she glanced up, hearing the odd sound of wingbeats. Max blinked at her as he settled.  
  
“How did you get in here?” It wasn’t unusual to see birds at the Citadel (green attracted all kinds of life to this place) but most birds were smart enough to stay away from people, especially when some of those people would eat one in an instant if they could catch it. And one this far inside was downright unheard of. It must have gotten lost.  
  
Max cawed at her, and she straightened up, wiping her hands with a rag, and considered him for a minute. There wasn’t a trace of recognition on her face, though, and Max cawed again, as if that might somehow help.  
  
Her brow creased and her mouth tightened, and she waved a hand at him. He jumped back, but returned after only a moment, perching closer to her and murmuring quietly.  
  
“Shoo! Get out of here!” she swiped the oil rag at him, and he flapped away with an indignant croak.  
  
“What’s going on?” A War Boy poked his head around the corner to see what the commotion was about.  
  
“A bird got in here somehow. Won’t go away.”  
  
“I can get it out of here for you,” the War Boy offered, stepping forward. Max stepped back with a nervous murmur. The War Boy lunged suddenly, and Max scrambled away. He made it up to the top of a tall, metal supply cabinet, just out of reach of the thankfully short War Boy, and settled his ruffled feathers. The War Boy looked up at Max as if he were dinner, and Max took a step back against the wall, just to be safe.  
  
“You’ll make a mess chasing it around here, is what you’ll do. Leave it be,” Furiosa groaned, still standing by the open hood of the truck. She didn’t need a bird in here distracting her, but she needed a War Boy bumbling around after it and breaking things even less. She sent the War Boy out, and sighed when the raven came back down from its hiding place to perch on the edge of the truck’s fender again.  
  
Eventually she got tired of chasing the creature away, and with a huff of a sigh and a shake of her head, she turned back toward the engine she was working on. The bird was harmless enough, and maybe it would eventually get bored and leave.  
  
She changed her mind when it started stealing tools. “Drop that!” she growled, swiping her hand at the bird as it carried off its third spanner. It flapped away toward its growing collection of objects on top of the supply cabinet, but stopped and seemed to consider her after it landed. It opened its beak and let the spanner clatter to the floor. Furiosa stopped her surge toward it and blinked. She looked from the tool on the floor to the bird atop the cabinet. It was looking at her almost expectantly. There was definitely something odd about this raven.  
  
Max had tried everything he could think of. He had cawed and croaked and murmured at her for a good fifteen minutes, growing increasingly frustrated at his inability to speak. She had seemed vaguely interested (or maybe just amused) for a while by the variety of sounds he was making in his attempts to speak, but eventually got tired of him, and as he sensed her annoyance growing, he had decided to try a different tactic before she decided to start throwing things at him.  
  
He had tried pecking patterns against the metal of the truck, which caught her attention again, and he thought he was getting through to her that he wasn’t just some random animal that had wandered in from the wastes. But she eventually lost interest in his continued tapping, and he cursed himself for not remembering Morse code.  
  
He had tried anticipating what tool she would need next and bringing it to her, but he seemed to be more of a distraction than a help, and she spent more time watching him out of the corner of her eye than actually working. What tools he did bring her were apparently not right, and she just looked at him quizzically.  
  
She simply wasn’t getting it, and he had realized he had to literally spell it out for her. And luckily, that was something he could actually do. He just needed four more tools.  
  
Furiosa eyed him almost suspiciously as she stepped forward and picked up the spanner he had dropped. He’d have to get another one to replace it, but at the time, showing her he understood her seemed more important. He was starting to get through to her, but it wasn’t quite enough. She gave him one last curious look before she turned back toward the truck with the spanner in her hand. Max waited until she was occupied with the engine again before he swooped down and quietly picked a ratchet from the toolbox behind her.  
  
When finally his collection contained eight tools and a spark plug, he began bringing them back down to the floor one by one, laying them out end to end in a lopsided zigzag for an M, then two angled together to make an A. Furiosa sighed at his quiet clanking and finally turned to see what he was up to this time as he laid the spark plug across the middle of the A. She stopped, frozen in place as she took in his little design, and Max blinked up at her. She frowned slightly, the gears turning in her head, and he flew up, grabbed another spanner, and laid it diagonally after the A. He was sure she was getting it now, but fetched the last one anyway, and completed the X, pecking it into a slightly less skewed shape before he looked up at her again and croaked.  
  
“…Max?” She said it as if she couldn’t possibly believe it.  
  
Max let out another small croak and nodded his head a couple of times.  
  
Furiosa stepped forward slowly, as if Max might scare, and lowered herself to one knee in front of him. She looked back at his name spelled out in tools on the floor, then back at him, a mixture of confusion and wonder in her eyes.  
  
“How is that possible?”  
  
Max croaked and shook his head. He certainly didn’t know.  
  
She reached out to him with her metal arm, and he stepped onto it carefully with another murmur, pleased he finally got through to her. Things would be okay now, not all was lost. Furiosa lifted her arm and stood up just as slowly as she had approached him, studying him closely. She squinted suspiciously, still having a hard time believing that this raven could possibly be him. (A well-trained bird, maybe, sent to trick her? She didn’t know why, but she could imagine an intelligent raven being a good spy.)  
  
She spun quickly toward the truck she was working on, and held Max out to it. “Where’s the carburator?”  
  
Max tilted his head to look up at her, a little exasperated after all his effort. But he couldn’t blame her for having a hard time believing something as strange as a man having turned into a raven. He flapped down to perch atop the engine block and pecked at the carburator a couple of times.  
  
“Battery?”  
  
He hopped to the other side of the engine and pointed his beak at it.  
  
“Fan belt.”  
  
He turned and reached over to put his foot on the belt.  
  
Furiosa’s shoulders dropped in acceptance, and she reached out for him again. “How did you manage this, Max?”  
  
He just shook his head again, pulling his wings up in the approximation of a shrug as he stepped back onto her hand. She held him up and reached to touch the feathers at the side of his neck, her eyes still filled with curiosity. Max sat patiently still as she looked him over, occasionally stroking her hand over his feathers as if making sure he was real.  
  
Finally she took a mental step back. “We need to talk.” She turned abruptly and left the repair bay with Max still perched on her metal arm. Max watched the concentration on her face as she walked. She was taking this seriously, and he was glad for it.  
  
“Hey, woah, woah! Furiosa!”  
  
Furiosa stopped suddenly, and Max cringed as if he had been caught at something.  
  
“Where did you get that?” Toast approached them from a side branch in the passageway, looking impressed by Max. “Is it friendly?” She reached out toward him carefully.  
  
Furiosa hesitated, and looked down at Max. No sense in hiding it, they’d have to find out eventually. “This is, uh… This is Max.”  
  
Toast snorted. “You named your pet bird after Max? What’s he gonna say when he hears that?”  
  
“No,” Furiosa said, forcefully keeping her cool, knowing this wasn’t going to be an easy thing. “This is him, right here. This is Max.”  
  
Toast’s smirk faltered for a moment, then grew again as she looked at Furiosa like she was crazy. “That’s a stupid joke, Furiosa. Nobody’s going to fall for it, and you know it.”  
  
Furiosa sighed and considered Max for a moment, who had slowly been hunkering down lower and lower. He almost had his beak buried in his chest feathers by now. “Guns,” she said to Toast. As head of security, Toast always had at least two on her person at any given time.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Guns,” Furiosa repeated, holding out her flesh hand expectantly. Toast gave her another strange look, but pulled one gun out of her belt and another from a holster under her arm. She held them both out and Furiosa extended her arm so Max could see them.  
  
“Which one’s the Glock?” Furiosa addressed Max.  
  
Max glanced at the two guns in Toast’s hands and pointed his beak at the Glock.  
  
Toast was silent, looking at Max disbelievingly. “It’s trained,” she reasoned.  
  
Furiosa shook her head. “Right, I’ve been hiding a bird from everybody for months so I could train him to do party tricks with guns,” she answered sarcastically.  
  
“You could have just traded for it,” Toast argued, determined. “This is crazy, Furiosa.”  
  
“Max, is the other gun a Luger?”  
  
Max shook his head.  
  
“How about an SKS?”  
  
Max burst out in what almost sounded like a laugh, and shook his head again.  
  
“Colt?”  
  
Finally Max nodded. Toast looked at him disbelievingly again. That is in fact what the other gun was.  
  
“Pretty well trained, for a bird,” Furiosa said challengingly.  
  
“Okay, say I believed you - which I don’t, by the way - how did this happen?”  
  
“I don’t know. I’m taking him to the council chambers. He needs something to write on.”  
  
“I’m getting the others.” Toast reholstered her guns and turned down the hall. Neither Max nor Furiosa was quite sure if she believed them now, or just wanted the others to laugh along with her at the joke. As a second thought, Furiosa made a side trip to gather some things from the armory before she headed to the council chambers. Max would probably need another test to prove who he was to them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [More art from icarus-doodles inspired by this chapter!](http://icarus-doodles.tumblr.com/post/141748949222)


	3. Chapter 3

Capable and Dag were already in the council chambers when Furiosa arrived with Max, discussing work schedules for the gardens. They both stopped and looked up, surprised to see Furiosa, not to mention the raven on her arm.  
  
“Where did you get a crow?” Dag asked.  
  
“I need the blackboard,” was all Furiosa said, as if it were an emergency.  
  
“Furiosa, we’re in the middle of—“  
  
“This is Max.”  
  
The other two women were silent for a beat.  
  
“What?” Dag looked decidedly unamused and just as disbelieving as Toast had been. Capable held a forcefully straight face, as if she didn’t know what to think.  
  
“I’m sorry, I have no other way to talk to him.” Furiosa started erasing the blackboard.  
  
“She’s lost it,” Dag announced seriously.  
  
Furiosa turned and glared at her. She reached for the bag hanging on her shoulder, making Max leap off her arm suddenly and fly to the table. She dumped the contents out onto the table in a messy pile, guns scattered around and bullets rolling every which way. “Max, match the bullets to their guns.”  
  
Max heaved a sigh and started picking at the pile, dragging the guns apart from each other and sorting the bullets into neat lines beside their proper firearms. Capable and Dag watched in awed silence.  
  
Furiosa had just finished erasing the large board and Max was about half done with his sorting when Toast burst into the room.  
  
“I couldn’t find— Oh, you’re here.”  
  
Cheedo trailed curiously behind her, and both stopped to stare at Max and his neat rows of arms and ammunition. He stopped and looked up at Toast as she leaned down to inspect his work.  
  
“The bird really did this?”  
  
Capable nodded. “We’ve been watching him do it.”  
  
“Well I’ll be damned. He’s got everything right.” Toast eyed Max suspiciously, but he could see she was no longer so sure that Furiosa was joking.  
  
“So that’s… That _is_ Max?” Cheedo asked quietly.  
  
Max nodded at her.  
  
“Maybe… Maybe he really is…” Dag was already looking at him less like he was just an animal. “I mean, he’s still got the same cowlick, even with feathers.”  
  
Max cocked his head as if he might be able to see the feathers sticking up on the top of his own head.  
  
“Here, Max. Tell us what happened.” Furiosa held out a piece of chalk to him and offered her arm as a perch again. Max flew up to grasp onto one of the struts of her forearm, and took the chalk in his beak. She held him up to the board, and he considered it for a moment. What would he tell them?  
  
His first attempt at a C looked more like an unfinished triangle, and as he craned his neck over to write a U, it turned out more like a tight V, almost an I.  He pulled his head back and grunted at the indecipherable letters, shaking his head. This angle was too awkward. He glanced over his shoulder at the large table in the middle of the room. Its surface was rough - it would probably work. He flew over, gripped the chalk tightly, and wrote the letters large across the table. They were still messy (and gave a whole new meaning to the term _chicken scratch writing_ ), but they were readable.  
  
CURSED BY WITCH  
LITTLEST SISTER CAN SAVE ME  
7 DAYS SILENCE  
  
He stood back, the chalk still in his mouth as the group read his badly-written message. One by one, the women had seemed to come to the final conclusion that this raven wasn’t just a bird.  
  
“Littlest sister,” Capable murmured thoughtfully. “Max, you have a sister?”  
  
Max shook his head.  
  
“Well, so much for that cure,” Toast said dully.  
  
The room was silent. Max nestled down, resigned. He hadn’t ever really thought he would be able to turn back into a man anyway, not after what the woman who cursed him had said. He had no sister, and if that was his only hope, then there was no hope. He’d have to get used to to life as a bird now.  
  
“What did you do to get cursed by a witch, anyway?” Toast asked, then added in a mutter, “still can’t believe this is happening.”  
  
Max stood slowly and picked up the chalk he had placed next to himself.  
  
WOULDN’T DRIVE HER SOMEWHERE  
  
They all stared at his new message.  
  
“A little extreme,” Capable commented. Max cawed in agreement.  
  
“Aw, come on, Max, that’s like your primary skill!” Toast teased him with a light shove. “What are you good for if not driving?”  
  
Max let out another sigh. Was now really the time to be cracking jokes at his expense?  
  
“But wait, what if the sister doesn’t have to be related by blood?” Dag looked around at the other women around her. “I mean, they call us sisters…”  
  
All eyes turned back to Max. None of them had really thought of him as a brother, but if anybody was, it would be Max.  
  
“Sounds like a long-shot,” Furiosa said.  
  
“Do we need to adopt him?” Cheedo asked.  
  
“If we did, that would make you the littlest sister,” Toast answered.  
  
“Actually, the question is, does ‘littlest’ refer to age, or size?” Dag smirked, eyeing Toast as she spoke. Toast slapped her across the shoulder.  
  
“Seven days of silence,” Capable said, ignoring Toast and Dag. “Is that what your little sister would have to do? That’s all?”  
  
Max nodded. To the best of his knowledge, that was it.  
  
Eyes turned next to Cheedo.  
  
“Are we sure there’s not some kind of thing we have to do to adopt him?” She looked like the world was suddenly on her shoulders.  
  
“Good point, how could we be sure that he counts as a brother?” Dag scrutinized Max as if he might have the answer.  
  
“I’d think since the curse is on him, it would have to be Max who thought of us as his sisters,” Capable reasoned. She turned her attention back to Max. “It’s on you.”  
  
Max was glad he wasn’t expected to speak, because he certainly didn’t have words right now. He looked at each woman in the room carefully while they stared back expectantly. He had considered them his friends, not sisters. But something had always brought him back to this place, and it felt like more than just the bond between friends that could bring him to do that. It was something stronger. He had been afraid of forming attachments for so long, but here he was, attached like he hadn’t been in thousands of days. He looked to Furiosa.  
  
Yes, he could think of them as sisters. And not just for the sake of lifting his curse. Max gave a quiet croak and a nod, and readjusted his wings against his sides. Capable smiled at him.  
  
“This still might not work,” Toast pointed out. “And it’s up to Cheedo, because _I’m_ certainly not the littlest.” She glared at Dag.  
  
Cheedo was looking concerned again. Max picked up his chalk.  
  
YOU DON’T HAVE TO  
  
He didn’t particularly want to be stuck as a raven, but he didn’t want her to feel pressured into doing this for him if she didn’t want to.  
  
“Max.” He looked over at Furiosa as she motioned to her shoulder. “Let’s let her think about it.”  
  
Max gave a nod and flew up to perch carefully on her shoulder pad. He settled, but as she moved slightly, he promptly scrabbled and slipped on the smooth metal, reflexively tried to catch himself with his arms on the way down (which didn’t work at all) and went crashing to the floor, wings flapping uselessly.  
  
The women all made valiant efforts not to laugh. Furiosa was crouched by him in an instant as he righted himself awkwardly. She tried to hide the smile that pulled at her mouth.  
  
“You alright?”  
  
Max nodded with a grunt and settled his feathers. He glanced around as if making sure nobody else had seen that, though he knew better based on the chuckles and smiles (and outright laughter from Toast). Furiosa offered him her arm, but he shook his head and hopped up to her shoulder again. He gripped one of the slats this time, hanging on tightly as Furiosa stood.  
  
“Take as much time as you need,” Furiosa said to Cheedo, placing a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll be in the repair bays.”  
  
“I’ll do it,” Cheedo said resolutely. Everyone looked at her, and she blinked back at them. “It’s not much to ask, for Max.”  
  
Furiosa paused on her trip to the door, and turned back to her. Max made a questioning murmur.  
  
“I just have to not talk for seven days. That’s not so bad.” Cheedo smiled a little.  
  
“It’s your choice. It might be for nothing,” Furiosa said, crossing her arms. “But I’m sure Max appreciates it.”  
  
Max nodded with a caw, and dipped his head in thanks to Cheedo. He wished he could thank her with words, but a croak was all he could manage. Cheedo closed her mouth and gave him a silent nod.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Raven!Max with a cowlick!](http://icarus-doodles.tumblr.com/post/141783937867/because-i-saw-lurkinghistoric-say-they-wanted)


	4. Chapter 4

Only Max’s new sisters knew that the raven that now accompanied Furiosa wasn’t just a bird. They let everyone else think what they wanted and Furiosa didn’t bother correcting people when they asked about her new pet (though she did look at Max guiltily every time someone said it). It was just simpler this way, and Max didn’t want everybody else to know.  
  
She gave him a bit of ration square to eat and took him back to the repair bay where he had found her. She needed to finish working on the truck.  
  
“I’ve got a trading run this afternoon. Do you want to come, or stay here?”  
  
Max stopped pecking at the ration square on the fender and considered her question. Might as well. There wasn’t much else he could do with himself right now. He croaked and gave a nod.  
  
“Alright, then help me finish this up. It’s supposed to be one of the escorts.” Furiosa leaned forward and pointed at the hose she needed to replace next. Max glanced at it then hopped down to the toolbox and picked the socket she would be needing for the hose clamp.  
  
That afternoon, Max perched on the back of the passenger seat of the trading rig as they pulled out of the Citadel. He had considered flying above so he could spot any oncoming trouble and warn Furiosa in advance, but his wings still ached from the days of flying to get to the Citadel. He preferred to be in her company anyway.  
  
Furiosa drove with a quiet calm, her eyes scanning for threats. They were barely half way there when cars burst from behind a nearby outcropping of rocks, apparently intent on taking the produce and water contained in the rig. Max’s feathers puffed out, and he glanced around for the nearest gun before he realized that he certainly was not going to be any help in this battle.  
  
Or was he?  
  
As the battle raged on around him, he eyed a collection of explosives similar to the ones that tip the War Boys’ lances. One of the raider vehicles was still darting around, launching explosives from its back and successfully keeping out of range of Citadel lances and anything fired at it. Max grabbed one of the explosives that had a strap around it and got himself up to the open side window.  
  
“Max! No!” Furiosa’s hand shot out toward him, but he was already out the window.  
  
He didn’t really plan this out. The second he was out the window, the wind hit him hard and he shot back, tumbling, the rig rushing past him. He clung to the explosive with both feet, hoping that the jostling wouldn’t set it off, and he flapped madly to regain control. He had to fly with everything he had just to try to keep up. Furiosa hit the brakes, searching her mirrors for any sign of him, and the rest of the vehicles slowed down to match. Max finally managed to catch up and pass the window again, slowly gaining height, and pulled away as his target vehicle swerved out of the way of another lance. The explosion fell back in its wake, and Max dodged quickly around it as he came up behind the vehicle. he matched its speed, gained some height as a second thought, and searched for a good weak spot as he tried to estimate how the explosive would fall. The vehicle dodged out of the way again as a Citadel car rushed toward it, and Max swooped to adjust with it. Distantly, he heard Furiosa yelling something out her window, but couldn’t make out what it was.  
  
Finally, flapping hard, he managed to pull ahead, took one last glance down behind him, and let go of the strap. The explosive hit the hood, and Max watched it bounce off without detonating. He faltered, disappointed, but quickly flapped to catch himself as he started to fall. He just as quickly lost control after the explosive flew over the top of the vehicle, bounced against the back of it, and finally hit its detonator and exploded. He had let himself get closer than he realized, and had to fight to keep himself in the air. The vehicle lost control and rolled, and Max cawed triumphantly. He glanced around for another target, but the War Boys had already taken care of the others.  
  
Furiosa continued to drive slowly until Max made it back safely into the window. “That was stupid, Max.”  
  
Max grunted, almost a growl (or as close to one as he could get like this) and settled back on the back of the seat. He had done it, hadn’t he? He didn’t see what the problem was. He waited until she turned her eyes back toward the road and pressed her foot on the accelerator again, then he surreptitiously checked his feathers to see how badly he had singed them.  
  
When they finally reached the Bullet Farm, Furiosa almost made Max stay in the rig, obviously a little angry. He wasn’t sorry for taking part in the road battle earlier, but he did feel a little bad about worrying her. If he had the use of words he would have apologized, but as it was, he had no idea how to express himself, so he just looked at her hopefully until she sighed and motioned for him to come. He perched himself on her shoulder as she and her crew headed to meet the officials now in charge of the Bullet Farm. They both knew this wasn’t going to be particularly fun. The Bullet Farm’s new leader had little respect for Furiosa. He had been one of the higher-ups for the Bullet Farmer, and had apparently rather liked the man.  
  
He eyed Max as the group approached. “Didn’t think you were the type to keep a waste of resources like that around.”  
  
Furiosa glanced at Max.  
  
Another of the men laughed. “Pretty ratty bird.”  
  
Max clacked his beak but remained perched on Furiosa’s shoulder.  
  
“I would just put it out of its misery and eat it, if I were you,” a third added.  
  
“We came here for business,” Furiosa replied flatly.  
  
“Right. Business. The usual deal, I presume?” The leader turned and motioned to the crates of ammunition behind him.  
  
Furiosa made a quick mental count of the crates, then motioned to the War Boys behind her to go check them out. “You won’t mind if I make sure it includes everything we agreed on.”  
  
“Of course not,” the new Bullet Farmer said with false pleasantness as the War Boys stepped past him. “God forbid the new princess of the Citadel doesn’t get all her munitions,” he sneered.  
  
Furiosa’s eyes narrowed, but she was used to his attempts to insult her, and wasn’t going to take the bait. Max crouched lower on her shoulder.  
  
The Bullet Farmer continued anyway. His insults were nothing new, but he was apparently feeling surly today. “Your War Boys were quick to change loyalties,” he mentioned almost casually as they started inspecting the crates. “No doubt because of the special _favors_ you must offer them. But I suppose they’d expect that from you, wouldn’t they? How else could a woman get to the rank you did under Joe?”  
  
Max launched himself off Furiosa’s shoulder.  
  
Furiosa’s hand shot forward, and mostly by luck she managed to catch Max by his wing before he got a chance to take out one of the Bullet Farmer’s eyes (as much as she would have liked to let him). She yanked him back, and after a bit more angry flapping, he finally hung still in her grip, glaring at the Bullet Farmer through one eye.  
  
The Bullet Farmer looked a little shocked by the attack, but shook it off and glared at Furiosa. “Best keep your pet under control.”  
  
Furiosa positioned her metal arm so Max could grip it with his feet, then released his wing. He settled down quietly, still eyeing the Bullet Farmer as Furiosa put her hand to his side, holding him back from repeating the attack she had just stopped. “He can sense weakness,” she told the Bullet Farmer. “You might not want to throw insults to cover up your own insecurities.”  
  
“It’s all here, Boss,” Ace said, a fortunate distraction from the building tension.  
  
“Good, swap the cargo.” She turned away as the War Boys set to work moving crates and hooking up the hose to the tanker. “The sooner we get out of here, the better,” she mumbled.  
  
They made quick work of it, and without another word to the Bullet Farmer (she couldn’t guarantee that she would _want_ to stop Max if he tried to attack the man again) she ordered the War Boys back to their vehicles and turned the convoy around to head back home.  
  
She brought Max to his room that night (he knew the way, but his wingspan was just a bit too wide to fly in some of the more narrow passageways of the Citadel, and wandering around on his own when most people didn’t know who he was was probably a bad idea). He knew this room, but he took one look and realized he wasn’t going to be able to sleep in here as he was. He couldn’t leave the door open, and wouldn’t let himself be trapped inside with it closed. If there were a window, he could have managed, but there wasn’t. He padded around the bed some, then looked up at Furiosa and shook his head.  
  
“What’s wrong?”  
  
He motioned toward the door with his beak, and Furiosa turned around, trying to decipher what he wanted to tell her.  
  
“What?”  
  
He sighed, hopped down to go over to the door, and shoved his weight against it until it closed, then pecked at it, looked up at her, and shook his head again.  
  
“You won’t be able to get out again.”  
  
Max nodded.  
  
“I’ll come back for you in the morning,” she told him.  
  
Max shook his head.  
  
Furiosa sighed. “We really need to find a better way to communicate.”  
  
He grunted.  
  
“Okay, come on, you can stay in my room.” She held out her arm for him as she pulled the door open.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That thing Furiosa was yelling that Max couldn’t hear? It was probably something along the lines of “MAX GET YOUR STUPID BIRD ASS BACK IN HERE BEFORE YOU BLOW YOURSELF UP.”


	5. Chapter 5

In the middle of the night, Max awoke to a realization.   
  
His car.   
  
His car was still out there, unattended and unguarded. Somebody could easily find it and help themselves to whatever they wanted. His supplies were replaceable. He hated to lose perfectly good stuff, but ultimately he could get new things. His car, however, was not replaceable and the very thought of it just sitting out there for someone else to find and take was enough for him to wake up Furiosa.   
  
He croaked urgently and tapped her arm with his beak. She woke with a start, and instantly had him pinned against the wall, her hand clamped around is chest. He cawed and struggled in her grip, his feet scratching at her wrist, only now realizing that waking her up like that had been a bad idea on his part. After a minute, she became aware enough to realize who he was and that he was not a threat, and released him quickly. She glanced around the room next for whatever immediate threat there must have been for him to wake her up. Seeing none, she turned back to Max and looked at him blearily.  
  
“Max, what?”  
  
Max cawed urgently again, spreading his wings to try to indicate the importance of what he wanted to say.  
  
Furiosa glanced out the window. It was still dark. The sun was nowhere near starting to rise yet. With a groan, she picked up her pillow and threw it on top of him, holding it down as he struggled and cawed beneath it. Max wiggled his way out from under the pillow, glaring at her as he settled his ruffled feathers. When she made no move to try and smother him again, he returned quickly to the matter at hand. He motioned toward the door with his beak, then flew over to it and pecked at the wood.  
  
“You need to get out?” Furiosa stood up and trudged across the room. Max jerked his head, trying to indicate that she should come with, but when she opened the door and just stood there, he resorted to pulling at the cuff of her pant leg, trying to lead her out into the hallway.  
  
He hopped and ran along as fast as his legs could go, spreading his wings and flying close to the ground when the hallways were wide enough to allow it. Furiosa followed reluctantly behind him. He led her to the council chambers, the only place he knew of where he could write.  
  
Furiosa yawned and lit a lamp while Max found a piece of chalk and started scribbling on the table again.  
  
CAR  
  
“What?”  
  
Max grunted and amended his previous message.  
  
MY CAR  
  
Furiosa blinked at the message, then reached up and rubbed her temple. “Where did you leave it?”  
  
2 DAYS DRI  
  
The chalk snapped in half as he hurried to write his message. Max grumbled, adjusted what was left of the chalk in his beak, and continued.  
  
VE NORTHEAST  
  
It could be done in a day and a half, maybe even one day if they hurried, but there was only so much he could explain when he had to write everything in chalk across a table using only his beak.  
  
Furiosa sighed. “I’ll see if I can get a small crew together to search for it tomorrow.”  
  
Max croaked in protest. He wanted to leave now, but Furiosa gave him a look that said the discussion was over and she wasn’t starting out on this in the middle of the night, and he shut his beak.  
  
In the morning, she risked taking him to the Meal Hall with her. Animals still weren’t so common around the Citadel (at least ones that weren’t wild or food), and she knew he would attract a lot of attention, but he was going to be stuck like this for at least another six days, and people were going to see him sooner or later. She gathered a plate of food for herself, whispering questions to Max about what he wanted to eat. The options were limited and she knew Max was usually happy eating anything, but she didn’t know if his preferences might have changed with his body. What did ravens eat, anyway? Max motioned toward a piece of flatbread with his beak, and nodded when she picked it up and added it to her plate.  
  
A War Boy who had been on the trading run the previous day picked up a plate after Furiosa, and watched Max with quiet wonder. “Pretty loyal bird,” he spoke up with a smile. “Where did you get it, Boss?”  
  
Furiosa turned, looking past Max to the War Boy beside her. “He was…” She looked over at Max, trying to come up with a believable story. “A gift. From a friend.”  
  
“Saw him go after the Bullet Farmer yesterday,” the War Boy continued. “Is he trained to attack or something?”  
  
“No, he, ah… just didn’t like the Bullet Farmer, apparently.”  
  
Max gave a short croak, the approximation of a grunt.  
  
“Can’t blame him. Can I pet him?” The War Boy was already reaching up toward Max before Furiosa could answer.   
  
Max bit.  
  
Furiosa barely even flinched at his sudden movement. She gave Max a look, but quickly wiped it off her face. “He doesn’t like being touched,” she told the War Boy calmly, turning her attention back toward the plate in her hands and grabbing a couple slices of fruit to add to it. She wouldn’t say biting was the best solution, but she couldn’t really blame Max for not wanting to be petted like an animal.  
  
The War Boy nodded, nursing his bitten finger. Max grumbled quietly.  
  
Furiosa eyed Max as she turned away to find a table. “No more biting people,” she murmured to him.  
  


 

* * *

  
  
“I need a hand with a retrieval run.” It was always straight to business with Furiosa, and Ace looked up from the thundersticks he was preparing.  
  
“What, just me?” He looked surprised.   
  
“Yeah, nothing fancy. I hope to slide under the radar. Probably just outrun anybody hostile.”  
  
“What are we retrieving?” Ace was looking at Max as he spoke, his expression curious.  
  
Furiosa followed his gaze to the raven on her shoulder. “…Max’s car,” she said honestly. Not like she could lie if he was the one going to help her get it.  
  
“And Max too, I assume?”  
  
“No, uh, he’s the one who asked me to get it. He’s here.”  
  
Ace’s eyes narrowed a bit. “Oh, didn’t hear about him coming back. What happened? Breakdown?”  
  
“Something like that. He kind of snuck in…”  
  
Ace’s mouth tilted to a steeper angle as he thought the situation over. He could read her well, and it was clear as day to him that something strange was going on. “You promised. No more evading answers.”  
  
Furiosa shook her head, but looked a little guilty. “I’m not lying.”  
  
“You weren’t last time, either.”  
  
She sighed and looked over at Max. She couldn’t read his expressions anymore. He peered at her through one eye, then gave a subtle nod.  
  
“You’re not going to believe me,” she finally said to Ace.  
  
“Try me.”  
  
“This is Max.” She tilted her head to the side, indicating the raven on her shoulder.  
  
Ace stared disbelievingly.  
  
“He couldn’t drive here, obviously. He just wants his car safe,” Furiosa continued.  
  
“Heard a lot of stories in my time,” Ace said after a silence. “That’s a new one.”  
  
“Max?” Furiosa looked over at him again and Max grumbled. What did she want him to do now?  
  
She glanced around for something Max could use to demonstrate he wasn’t just a bird again, then pointed to a box of tools behind Ace. “Can you bring me a sixteen millimeter spanner?”  
  
Still grumbling, Max glided down to the toolbox and picked through it, placing tool after tool aside and pecking at others to see the small measurement stamp until he found the right one and walked back over to Furiosa with the tool in his beak.  
  
“How about a screwdriver? Flathead.” She handed the spanner off to Ace to verify that it was the right one. Max walked back over to the box. That one was easy at least. There was one right on top. He brought her that, too.  
  
Ace was still looking unsure, staring at the two tools Furiosa had handed him.  
  
“Ask him for something. He’s not a trained bird,” Furiosa told him.  
  
Ace shook his head. “No, I’ll go with it. I mean, it’s pretty unbelievable, but I don’t see any reason to lie about this…” He looked from Furiosa to Max standing on the floor beside her. “So Max wants his car back. Let’s go get it.”  
  
Max croaked and nodded in agreement.  
  
They outfitted one of the Citadel’s fastest vehicles and set out, Furiosa behind the wheel, Ace riding shotgun, and Max perched behind Furiosa. Max would point his beak to direct Furiosa when he saw a landmark he recognized, and they were close to where Max left his Interceptor by the time night fell and Furiosa stopped. Max croaked and shook his head, pointing his beak urgently ahead. They were so close. They could make it in another hour or so.  
  
“Visibility’s too low tonight and this is a safe place to stop. We’ll find it in the morning.” Furiosa started unloading supplies from the back, and Max looked longingly ahead, toward where he knew his car was waiting (or hoped it was still waiting).  
  
Several times Furiosa had to stop him from flying off to find his car, telling him it was too dark without the moon out tonight (and finally threatening that she was just going to lock him in the car if he wasn’t going to stay put, because she was not about to go on a search for him _and_ his car if he got himself lost out there). Finally he settled down and pecked half-heartedly at the dried fruit she had given him.  
  
Max didn’t sleep well, and in the morning he was off before Furiosa and Ace had even finished packing up their camp. Furiosa paused long enough to watch him go, and when he (unsurprisingly) wasn’t back by the time they were ready, she set off in the direction he had gone.  
  
Max spotted Furiosa catching up to him before he even found his car, but he kept flying anyway, climbing high to gain a better vantage until the shine of the sun reflecting off of glass caught his eye and he recognized the rock formation near which he had left his car. He let himself drop and swooped low in front of Furiosa’s car, leading her along the right path.  
  
When finally they reached it, he perched triumphantly on the roof of his Interceptor and looked it over, walking from one corner of the roof to another before dropping down to the window and hopping inside. His camp was raided, half the supplies in his car gone - about as much as a couple people could carry off, he guessed - but his car looked whole. Not exactly where he had left it, but whole. The kill switches Furiosa had helped him install seemed to have served their purpose well. He was glad they made it here as quickly as they did, though. Whoever found and raided his camp would likely have been back soon to claim the rest, and there was nothing kill switches could do about another vehicle with a tow chain.  
  
“Everything okay?” Furiosa leaned in the window as Max was picking through what was left in his car. He considered his surroundings. He lost a lot, and all the best stuff, but the most important thing was still here. He nodded. He would have smiled if he could have.  
  
“Great, then let’s get back.” Max hopped over as Furiosa opened the door and climbed into the driver’s seat. He pointed his beak and clicked out numbers to lead her through the kill switch sequence (she had helped him install it, but the sequence had always been his own) and soon they were on their way again. Max nestled comfortably in his passenger seat, finally relaxing now that he knew his Interceptor was in safe hands.


	6. Chapter 6

Max slept better knowing his car was safe in the garages, and the following morning he went with Furiosa to the Meal Hall again for breakfast.  
  
Cheedo and Dag were already at a table, finishing up their breakfasts in companionable silence. Cheedo looked up and waved as Furiosa approached, and Max flew ahead, landing on the table with a croak for a greeting.   
  
Furiosa placed the vegetables he had selected in front of him as she sat down. “How go the efforts to save Max from his fate?” she asked with a little smirk, as Max started picking at his breakfast.  
  
“She hasn’t made a sound in days,” Dag said for Cheedo. “So going well, I guess.”  
  
Cheedo gave a little smile. Max wished again that he could express himself like a human. He wished he had been able to do something about his problem himself, but he was grateful that she was willing to help him. He just didn’t know how to tell her that. He picked up the cherry tomato in front of him and placed it surreptitiously on her plate. Cheedo smiled and held back a laugh.  
  
Furiosa and Dag talked as they ate, and Cheedo listened quietly, nodding or making hand motions as her part in the conversation. Max focused on his food, only half-listening.  
  
When Furiosa got up to leave, Max stayed on the table. She glanced back, but he was looking at Cheedo. He had never been one to talk much, but he understood now how hard it was to not be able to speak when he wanted to, and he felt bad that Cheedo was now going through that for his sake. The least he could do was keep her company if she wanted it. He turned and met Furiosa’s eyes, but didn’t move to fly after her, so she shrugged and continued on her way.  
  
When Dag and Cheedo got up to leave, Max followed along behind them. They split ways in the hallway, Dag presumably off to the gardens, and Max made a questioning murmur. Cheedo turned back and motioned for him to join her. He hopped along to catch up, and walked quietly beside her. The silence between them was comfortable. Neither could communicate by voice, so neither of them felt obligated to try.  
  
Cheedo stopped by the record room and flipped through some papers, filled densely with tables and notes. Max peered at the title on the top page. _Building Projects_. Cheedo had taken on the job of liaison to the people down below, and was in charge of bringing them what they needed to survive and thrive. They had been working for some time on building permanent structures for people to live in, turning the space below the Citadel’s towers into a proper town. This was where she kept track of what had been given, and what was still needed.  
  
Cheedo scribbled a note on a fresh line, and Max moved in to look. _Day 592_ (he assumed that was today’s date by the new Citadel standard - he could never keep track) _routine check -_ she left a blank space for notes, and picked up the page to take with her. She would always go down every five days or so to see how the people were doing, to talk to them and see what they needed to continue growing the town. Today was apparently one of those days, and though she couldn’t do much in the way of talking, she was going to do the best she could anyway.  
  
She looked to Max and motioned to her shoulder, an invitation to join her. Max perched carefully, trying not to let his claws dig in as she headed for the lift bay.  
  
They descended on one of the small, crane-driven lifts, a couple War Boys with them to help out. Max leapt off her shoulder and flew circles around the lift, just because he could. Flying high in the air was a thrill, and something he would miss if he ever changed back. As the lift settled on the ground with a thud and Cheedo and the War Boys stepped off, Max landed on her shoulder again, still wary of the people around him.  
  
Cheedo walked through the city, examining buildings, stopping to watch a group of people in the midst of building a new one, and just observing how the people were doing. The War Boys had split off to ask the questions of the people that Cheedo couldn’t ask. Instead, she’d motion to her throat and shake her head with a frown whenever someone came up and tried to talk to her, trying to indicate that she had no voice. She would listen, though, and write notes in small script on the paper she had brought. She examined the water tanks, making sure they were in working order, and went as far out as there were people.  
  
After a couple hours, Max could feel her shoulder under him start to shift uncomfortably, and she nudged him, indicating her other shoulder. Max gave an apologetic murmur, and dropped to the ground beside her instead. He was not a small bird, but hadn’t really stopped to think about how heavy he must have been. Furiosa was used to carrying extra weight in her shoulder, but Cheedo was not. He’d just do the same to her other shoulder. She looked down at him, and he gave a reassuring nod. He could keep up.  
  
He stuck close to her side as she continued her rounds, his legs working quickly to keep up with even her leisurely strides. When she was stopped by someone and listened to them with quiet nods, Max saw something skitter out of the corner of his eye, and took a few curious steps toward it, stretching his neck to see. A lizard darted out from behind a rock, heading for the next one, and Max remembered suddenly how long it had been since he had last had meat. The Citadel had good food, but meat was still a bit of a rarity in the Meal Hall, and he craved it. And unlike in human form, a lizard would actually make a pretty good meal now. He took a few more careful steps toward it, focused on it intently, picking up his pace as it hurried to another rock and stopped briefly in the shade.  
  
After chasing it past a few more rocks without success, he took to the air, circling carefully, trying to not let his shadow cast over the lizard and scare it. When it stopped in the shade of another rock, he dove, both talons and beak ready to grab his meal, but the lizard darted out of the way at the last moment. Max tried to adjust to compensate, but missed it anyway, and watched with a grumble as it ran to the next rock. Apparently that hunting method would take a little more practice.  
  
He crouched to take to the air again, but suddenly someone threw a bag over him and scooped him up in it. He was so focused on the lizard he hadn’t even realized there were people nearby. Max cawed in alarm, flapping and flailing against the bag, panicked at being trapped as the woman who caught him whooped triumphantly. He tried to get to the top, but she was holding it closed tightly. Max cawed again and tried to tear at the fabric with his beak.  
  
Cheedo glanced over her shoulder at the racket, just in time to see a woman swing a large, burlap, flailing bag over her shoulder. She gasped as she realized Max was no longer beside her, and rushed toward the woman carrying the cawing bag. She grabbed her shoulder to get her attention, and when the woman turned around, Cheedo shook her head furiously, waving her arms back and forth in front of her.  
  
The woman frowned at her, trying to decipher what she was doing. “I don’t understand. What do you want?”  
  
Cheedo pointed at the bag slung over the woman’s shoulder, shaking her head.  
  
The woman’s frown deepened. “Sorry, love, you’re going to have to catch your own if you want some. I’ve got a kid to feed.”  
  
Cheedo’s eyes widened and she waved her arms harder. The woman shook her head with another apology and turned away to leave. Cheedo grabbed the bag and pulled.  
  
“Hey! I caught it fair! It’s mine!” She tugged the bag back and turned to hurry away again.  
  
Next Cheedo tried scribbling a message on the back of her note page, and ran around in front of the woman, holding it in her face.  
  
The woman pushed past her. “Leave me alone. I can’t read that.”  
  
“Wait!” Cheedo finally burst out. “You can’t eat him! He’s, uh… he’s Furiosa’s bird!”  
  
Max stopped flailing. The woman turned again, eyeing Cheedo suspiciously. “You’re lying.”  
  
“I’m not! I’m just taking care of him for the day. Please, she’ll… she’ll be so mad if something happens to him!”  
  
The woman stood silently, thinking it over.  
  
“I’m not trying to steal your food, but he’s a tame bird. Let me prove it to you.”  
  
“I’m not just going to let it go,” the woman grumbled.  
  
“Then let’s take him to Furiosa. She’ll tell you.” Cheedo sounded on the verge of tears.  
  
“Why didn’t you just say all that from the beginning?”  
  
“I wasn’t supposed to talk…”  
  
The woman hummed, still distrustful.  
  
“I’ll give you food equal to his weight,” Cheedo offered. “Please, just give him back.”  
  
“Meat?” The woman’s eyes were narrowed.  
  
“I… I can try. Please, just come up to the Citadel. We’ll get it sorted out.”  
  
Max sat quietly in the bag as they headed back to the lift, rose to the heights of the Citadel, and Cheedo negotiated getting enough food for the woman to let Max go.  
  
When the woman was satisfied with her armload of food, she finally dumped out her bag to fill it with her new prizes. Max tumbled out unceremoniously, and Cheedo hurried forward to grab him off the ground. She looked him over as he shook his head, dizzy and confused.  
  
“Are you okay?” She smoothed out some of the feathers sticking up at wild angles, spending several seconds on the ones atop his head, though they sprung back up every time she smoothed them down.  
  
Max nodded and puffed his feathers out and shook himself before letting them settle back down. He still looked in a state of disarray. He probably broke some feathers, he noted, looking down at himself.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Cheedo mumbled after the woman had left and it was just the two of them. “I’m really sorry…”  
  
Max shook his head with a murmur. It wasn’t her fault he had wandered off and gotten himself caught.  
  
“I know I shouldn’t have talked, but I didn’t know how else to stop her!”  
  
Oh. That. Max blinked a couple of times. Considering she had just saved him from being eaten, Max thought that was a perfectly fair trade. He shook his head again, croaking and stretching out a wing to place awkwardly on her shoulder. He wished he could tell her that it was okay, that he was still grateful, but she seemed to understand.  
  
“I’ll start again. Right now.” She closed her mouth and said no more, and Max looked up at her guiltily. She didn’t have to be doing this, and yet she was determined to help him, even if it was his fault she had had to restart. He could only hope that it would actually work and her efforts wouldn’t be wasted.


	7. Chapter 7

The longer Max was a raven, the more he started to notice some rather unique animal instincts encroaching on his behavior.  
  
Random objects were suddenly much more interesting, for starters. Things he’d never given a second thought to before. Even better if they shined. They caught his attention, and he couldn’t help himself from checking them out. He found himself fascinated by an old bottle cap, and pecked curiously at a bead he found. If what he found was small enough (and he thought nobody would miss it) he’d take it with him. Some of them he felt compelled to give to Furiosa or to Cheedo or one of his other sisters, but most of them he stashed away, either atop a cabinet in the repair bays, or in a jar he found on a high shelf in Furiosa’s room.  
  
Furiosa, of course, noticed this new habit and considered talking to him about it. But it was relatively harmless (and a little endearing when he’d bring her a bolt or an old coin he found somewhere, or drop a lost button into Cheedo’s hand) and she knew where his stashes were, so she could retrieve anything that was actually missed by someone. She didn’t know why he was suddenly doing this, but figured it had to have something to do with his current form. It wasn’t the only new thing he’d do now.  
  
Grooming and preening was another. He had never really been one to care about his appearance before (as the usual state of his hair and clothes would attest), and really he still didn’t, but he found himself grooming his feathers anyway. Usually it was just to rearrange them. He didn’t really care about how dusty and dirty they were, but they felt funny if they were out of place, and he couldn’t get used to it. At first he would pick at them awkwardly, still feeling weird about having to use his mouth instead of his hands, but he adjusted to it quickly and got the hang of easily fixing anything out of place. And soon he would do it even if his feathers were all properly arranged, just for a lack of anything else to do.  
  
The first time he started grooming through Furiosa’s short hair as he perched on her shoulder, she had frozen, her eyes rolling over to try to look at him without moving her head. She didn’t really understand what he was doing, but he seemed content to be doing it. When Max realized she was standing stock still and stiff, he stopped quickly. He wanted to explain that there had been some flakes of something stuck in her hair, but just croaked a quiet apology instead and kept his beak to himself. Even if he could talk, it would have been difficult to explain why he kept grooming even after the offending flakes were gone. It had just felt like the thing to do.  
  
He also nested when he slept. Max didn’t know why he did this either. It just felt right. Furiosa didn’t think much of it at first, figuring it was just his way of getting comfortable since he couldn’t lie down in a bed anymore. Even when she shared the bed with him and gave him a pillow of his own to nestle in, he’d still find something - a spare shirt, one of her scarves, even an oil rag (she took that one away from him) - to arrange into a little nest before he’d settle down for the night.  
  
Sometimes, if he was on watch duty or in the repair bays with her and was bored, he’d nest there too.  
  
“Where’s my scarf?” Furiosa wiped her brow with the back of her arm and put her spanner aside. She wanted to take this motor bike out for a test ride to make sure the new engine was up to snuff, but her scarf wasn’t where she left it.  
  
She got a few shaken heads from people who hadn’t seen it, before one War Boy spoke up. “Your bird stole it. Bit me when I tried to get it back from him.”  
  
Furiosa sighed. She looked toward the worktable the War Boy was indicating with his finger. Sure enough, there was her scarf. And Max, sitting comfortably right on top of it. She approached and Max picked his head up from where it was rested on his wing and blinked at her tiredly.  
  
“Max, I need that.”  
  
He looked down at the scarf, then back up at her.  
  
“Come on, get off.” She shoved at his chest as she pulled the scarf out from under him, and he croaked unhappily. “I’m going for a ride, you can come if you want.”  
  
Max got to his feet and stretched his wings. He flew past Furiosa as she headed back toward the bike, putting the scarf around her neck, and he perched on the handlebars, happy for something to do. Normally he would keep himself occupied with work while he was here, but as he was, he could do little more than occasionally bring Furiosa tools as she worked. Or look for more objects to collect, but he tried to be discreet about that.  
  
They set off at a slow pace after they were on the ground and past the growing city at the foot of the Citadel, but Furiosa quickly picked up speed, and Max enjoyed the wind blowing through his feathers. The urge to fly caught him suddenly, and he inched over to the side before leaping off and taking to the air.  
  
“How fast can you go?” Furiosa yelled over the sound of the engine and the rush of the wind as Max flew close beside her. Max wasn’t sure, but he flapped harder to find out, and they were soon racing through the desert, weaving between obstacles, and seeing who could go faster. Eventually Max’s wing muscles burned with the effort, and he dropped off behind her. Furiosa turned back around toward the Citadel. She had been satisfied with the bike’s engine quite a while ago, but had let herself indulge in a little fun as she raced with Max. He had actually given her a good run for her money on the rocky terrain. She stopped to let him get back on the handlebars, and they headed home.  
  


* * *

  
  
Back at the Citadel, Max had to return to other means of keeping himself from getting bored. He could sit by for a while as Furiosa moved on to helping out in the gardens, enjoying the sight of green all around him, but eventually his mind started to wander, and then he did too. They had given him a scrap of white cloth to wear tied around his leg a couple days ago to identify him by, so workers in the garden would stop trying to chase him away from the crops, and he could wander away from the people he knew more freely now. (Sometimes workers wouldn’t see the cloth and would still swing things at him to chase him away, but usually it helped.)  
  
Max found an assortment of old cans and jars as he wandered around by foot, and approached them curiously. He peered inside one jar and found a small handful of seeds, long and narrow. He resisted the urge to try to eat them. Inside another were tiny seeds, specks that almost looked like sand in the bottom of the container. He looked through other jars and cans, wondering what plants would grow from each one, until he found a can of larger seeds. There were only three, but they looked like some kind of fruit pit. Cherry, maybe? Where had they gotten cherry seeds? He could barely see them, so he reached inside to pull one out, but once he had the cherry pit in his beak and he pulled his head back, the can stuck with him.  
  
He croaked, dropping the seed in his beak, and stumbled backward. He tripped over something and fell back onto his rump, then got back on his feet and scrambled backward some more, dragging the can along the ground. He shook his head, the seeds rattling back and forth around his face, but the can stayed firmly lodged in place, and he brought his foot up, scraping frantically at the side, trying to find the edge and push the thing off. He caught his claws on the lip of the can and pushed, but to no avail. He was starting to panic when something stronger than him finally pulled the can gently, a hand resting on his back to hold him in place, and after a couple tugs, his head finally came free.  
  
“That curiosity is going to be the death of you.”  
  
Max blinked in the bright light and found Dag smirking down at him, the can in her hand as she leaned down above him. He mumbled in response, embarrassed.  
  
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone you got your head stuck in a can.” She was holding back laughter, and Max occupied himself with picking up the seeds that had spilled on the ground when she pulled the can off. Dag held out her hand for them as he offered them to her, and she dropped them back into the can. “Cherry seeds. In case you were wondering.”  
  
Max nodded. Dag set the can down with the other containers of seeds and sat next to Max, looking out over the garden. Past the nearest crop bed, Max could see Furiosa, her prosthetic arm hanging on a nearby tree as she dug into the soil with her other hand. She always looked so at peace when she worked in the gardens. Machinery and guns had become her element, but working with green life would always remind her of her youth, when things were so much more carefree and peaceful.  
  
Dag nudged Max with her elbow. “Hey.”  
  
He peeled his eyes away from Furiosa and looked up at her questioningly.  
  
“I don’t know if Cheedo is going to be able to break your curse or not… But either way, I hope you’ll stay. We worry about you out there.”  
  
Max blinked a couple of times. Sometimes it still caught him off-guard to remember that people actually cared about him here. He wasn’t just some scav wandering the wasteland. He could almost feel his mouth quirking into a smile, though he knew that wasn’t possible. Of course he’d have to stay if he didn’t change back; without being able to carry supplies, he was sure he wouldn’t make it long out there. But if Cheedo’s efforts did work, would he be able to stay? Could he finally settle down? It might take some getting used to, but he was willing to try. He had family here now, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [More awesome art](http://icarus-doodles.tumblr.com/post/149134973902/i-finally-caught-up-on-reading-the-amazing-corvus) from Icarus from the last few chapters!  
>  Also some art from tinymammoth of [Max grooming Furiosa's hair!](https://thehurriedhawk.tumblr.com/post/151669641369/inktober-day-10-inspired-by-the-corvus-cormax)


	8. Chapter 8

That evening, the Sisters gathered for dinner, and Furiosa and Max joined them.  
  
It turned out soup was not the easiest thing for Max to eat, but he wasn’t about to complain. He found out the hard way that the small cup Dag had placed in front of him was deeper than his beak was long, and he nearly inhaled the broth trying to reach the chunks of vegetable that had sunk to the bottom. Even after days of being like this, he was still getting used to his new body. He pulled his head back from the cup suddenly as broth ran into his nostrils, and he shook his head back and forth as he forced out a breath, splattering soup around him in the process. Furiosa looked at him with a raised brow, and he mumbled quietly.  
  
He stepped up to his cup again, glancing at the others to make sure none of them had noticed his miscalculation, then carefully scooped up a beakful of broth. He’d just have to drink the level lower. Even when he could reach the bottom of the cup, however, he still ended up dripping soup onto the table and down his own feathers as he tried to eat some of the larger vegetables. He looked around at the others as they ate easily with spoons and hands, and grumbled to himself before diving back into his cup with his beak.  
  
When he was full, he stepped back from the small splatter of soup he had made on the table, and used his foot to wipe some droplets off his beak. The women talked cheerfully amongst themselves, and even though Dag turned to Max with a small smirk a couple of times, she kept her promise not to tell any of them about his run-in with a can earlier that afternoon.  
  
Unable to take part in the conversation, Max sat back quietly and eventually began preening his feathers. It was a few minutes before Dag zeroed in on him.  
  
“Max. Max, what are you doing?”  
  
Max released the feathers in his mouth and blinked at her a couple times. He hadn’t really even realized he was doing it.  
  
“Is he eating his feathers?” She asked the others.  
  
“No, I think he’s grooming himself,” Capable answered.  
  
“So he’s licking dirt off himself,” Toast announced.  
  
Cheedo wrinkled her nose and stuck her tongue out. Max inched backwards as they all looked at him judgmentally.  
  
“I mean, at least he’s keeping himself clean for once?” Dag shrugged. It was better than nothing.  
  
“Yeah, but it’s kind of gross. And he is pretty dirty.” Toast looked at the others.  
  
Conspiratorial smirks crossed their faces as they glanced at each other, and Max squawked suddenly as they collectively descended upon him. He looked to Furiosa for help as they seized him and carried him out of the room, but she simply smiled and gave him a wave, then went back to her meal.  
  
Toast carried him pinned under her arm, her hand wrapped tightly around both his feet as they headed down the passageway. They entered one of the few rooms that had running water, and Max squawked again and struggled in Toast’s grip.  
  
“Oh hush, you’re not an animal and we’re not letting you clean yourself with your mouth,” Capable reached over and put a hand around his beak to quiet his caws.  
  
He watched glumly as they filled a basin with warm water and located a bar of the Citadel’s home-made soap. Then all eyes turned back to Max, and he murmured nervously.  
  
Twenty minutes later found Max sopping wet and miserable. He had made it clear that he wanted no part of this, but the Sisters had been happy to take it on themselves instead. At the very least, he had brought them down with him, splattering water everywhere as he had thrashed and flapped and attempted to fly away as they dunked him in the basin of water and scrubbed the dirt from his feathers. All four of them were nearly as wet as he was by the end, but they looked satisfied with their work. He sat dripping on the edge of the basin and glowered at them as they smiled.  
  
They brought him back to the dinner table wrapped in a towel and showed him off to Furiosa, who held back her amusement admirably at his wet, matted feathers.  
  
“Okay, okay, stop tormenting him,” she finally said as they began toweling him dry and he croaked pathetically. They finally released him and he hurried away to the corner of the table farthest from them. He shook himself off and settled down, eyeing them distrustfully and fluffing his feathers out to try to fend off the cold.  
  
“Sorry,” Furiosa said to him as he glared at her as well. “You did kind of need it.”  
  
“Who knew he was black instead of grey?” Toast laughed.  
  
Max decided then (the bird in him be damned) he would never be caught grooming himself in front of them again.  


 

* * *

 

  
  
“We’re going to go do a salvage run at the underground mall today,” Furiosa told Max over breakfast. “I think you could be of some help, if you want to come.”  
  
Max nodded eagerly, and Furiosa cracked a little smile at his reaction. “There are some areas that collapsed, with spaces too small for us to fit through. If you’re up to it, it would be good to scope them out and see if any are worth excavating.”  
  
Max nodded again. He had been itching to get out of the Citadel. He felt so useless lately. He hurried to finish his biscuit, and hopped after Furiosa when she got up to clean up her plate and leave.  
  
In the lift bay a few hours later, Ace gave Max a nod as he joined Furiosa and the other War Boys as they prepared to head out. He’d never greet Max by name around the others, but he believed Max was who Furiosa said he was. Once the idea had been put to him, it was hard not to notice how Max acted like no bird ever would. (Also only Max would be as protective of that old beat up Interceptor as that bird was. V8 help the man who tried to touch it when the raven was around.)  
  
“You joining us today?” Ace asked Max quietly when he was sure nobody else would hear. Furiosa had stopped worrying about people hearing her talk to a bird days ago; she wasn’t going to ignore Max just for the sake of not getting weird looks from people. Ace wasn’t quite there yet.  
  
Max gave a nod and hopped from the hood of the truck onto the open window frame as Ace climbed in the passenger seat.  
  
“She’s putting you to work on those collapsed areas, isn’t she?”  
  
Max nodded again. He would stop to wonder if she had planned this salvage run solely because he was suddenly small enough to get through tight spaces in the rubble, but he didn’t really care. It was a chance to get out of the Citadel and do something, and that was all Max really wanted.  
  
“Can you keep lookout?” Furiosa asked Max as she got in the driver’s seat next to Ace and started up the truck. Max nodded and leapt off the door to fly ahead and scout. They both doubted there would be a problem on the short trip to the buried mall, but it was always better to avoid a fight if you could.  
  
Max checked the landscape from high above, searching out hidden cars or raider camps that were close enough to try to attack the small convoy. He saw what he thought were probably Buzzard cars in the distance, but not near enough to be a threat, and he continued on. When he was sure it was safe, he swooped lower to follow the convoy to their destination.  
  
He landed on the roof of Furiosa’s truck after she pulled to a stop and got out. They had covered and locked the entrance to the mall long ago to keep other scavengers out, and she inspected the two metal doors set into the ground carefully for signs of tampering before she unlocked them and pulled one of the heavy doors open. Max landed on her shoulder and peered down the darkened ramp that led into the mall. She lit a flare and headed in.  
  
There were fire barrels already set up throughout the mall, and Furiosa lit each as she walked by, filling all but the backs of the shops with flickering light. Max looked around as she walked, craning his neck to see in certain shops. Most were already raided and empty, and he could only tell what they had once been by the signs above them, if even those were left intact.  
  
They passed by the food court, and Max leapt off Furiosa’s shoulder to explore by wing. She continued on by it, but when she realized he wasn’t catching up, she stopped and looked back over her shoulder.  
  
“Hey, come on. There’s nothing edible left in there. We’ve scoured through it already.” She didn’t really stop to think that Max’s current definition of ‘edible’ might have differed from hers. A clatter and a plastic rustling caught her ear after a minute, and with a sigh she turned back and ventured into the food court, checking behind counters and under tables until she found him. He was standing on some small, plastic packet, using his beak to tear at the end.  
  
She held her torch up to try to make it out better, and squinted at the contents of the package. “What are you doing?”  
  
He glanced up at her only briefly. He was hungry, was what he was doing. He hadn’t seen treasures like these in years. He continued trying to tear the plastic package open.  
  
Finally Furiosa made out the words _Hot Dogs_ under his feet, and her brows rose. Whatever was in that packet certainly hadn’t qualified as hot dogs in a long, long time.  
  
“Hey, no.” She moved in and snatched the packet of shriveled, green hot dogs out from under him. “You’re going to make yourself sick if you eat that.”  
  
Max cawed indignantly. She carried it over to the nearest fire she had lit and tossed the packet onto it as Max hopped after her as fast as his legs could take him, croaking at her. He could see his meal slide to the edge, and he inched forward, braving the heat to try to pull the hot dogs out. Furiosa glanced back over her shoulder.  
  
“Max!” She darted toward him, sweeping her arms in the air as she shooed him away from the fire and he fluttered backward, startled by the movement. Max looked longingly at the hot dogs as the plastic package melted across them and they slowly started to catch fire, then he glared up at her.  
  
Furiosa gave him a stern look. “You’re smarter than that, Max. You know you can’t eat something like that.”  
  
Max grumbled and turned away. He glanced over his shoulder at the food court again.  
  
“No, come on.”  
  
Reluctantly, he followed her.  
  
She approached a sloped wall of rubble. “This is the first area,” she said, glancing down at him to make sure he was still with her this time. She pointed up to the top along the wall. “There’s a gap, just there. See if you can get to the other side and see if there’s anything back there.” She reached into the bag at her side and found a small candle lantern, then lit it and held the handle out for him. He took it in his beak.  
  
He flew up to the gap she had indicated and ventured inside. He wasn’t exactly built to be scrambling around in tight spaces. The footing was uneven, and he lost his balance a couple of times and had drop the lantern and push himself up with his beak. He squeezed through a narrow portion and suddenly found himself on the other side. It looked like part of the ceiling had caved in and everything that came through just formed a single blockage. He turned and looked up. Excavating might be dangerous. It looked like more would just fall through as soon as they took any of the rubble out, but it might be possible.  
  
But was there anything worth excavating it for? He turned back to the wide emptiness in front of him. The little lantern didn’t give off much light, and all he saw was black. He dared not try to fly with such little visibility, so he hopped carefully down the rubble pile and explored by foot.  
  
It was an amazing sight, this relic of times long past, untouched by scavengers or raiders. Other than some damage by fallen rocks or collapsed supports, almost everything was as it was before the world fell, and he imagined himself walking through the mall long ago, light all around him and people bustling here and there.  
  
He took mental stock of what he saw. A clothing store. A little impractical, but there could be something useful in there. Perfume store. He inspected the decorative bottles, most of them dried up, or fallen and cracked. Electronics. Sports clothing. Kids’ toys. He took a detour into the toy store, his curiosity at so many interesting trinkets getting the best of him.  
  
He wasn’t sure how long he was there, but got pulled away from pecking at a small train set when he heard Furiosa’s muffled voice yell his name from the other side of the rubble pile.  
  
“Max? Is everything okay back there?”  
  
Max gathered himself, glad she couldn’t see him and he wouldn’t have to explain what he was doing pecking at kids’ toys, and crowed loudly to let her know he was still okay before he picked up his lantern and continued on. He tried to finish his inspection quickly, going to the end of the short hallway and circling back to look at the shops along the other side. Clothing, clothing, candles, makeup, clothing… Some of this had to be of use.  
  
Camping store. He made a sharp turn into the shop. This was exactly the kind of stuff he would have dreamed of finding when he wandered alone through the wastes. Useful beyond belief to wanderers like himself and worth a fortune in trade. He walked up and down the short aisles, looking at the bundles of paracord, the utility knives, metal camping cups and plates, portable stoves, sleeping pads, tents, and sleeping bags. He set aside his lantern and pulled down a low-hanging packet of freeze-dried camping food. This stuff would last forever. He could survive weeks on just what was here.  
  
Furiosa called his name again, and he looked back and forth quickly between the packet of just-add-water beef stew, and the candle lantern. He could only really carry one, and he unfortunately needed the lantern to get back out. Reluctantly, he left the packet behind and made his way to the rubble pile, reminding himself this was just one of the collapsed areas. He looked forward to what he would find in the others.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes Max dive-bombs people who get too close to his car.  
> Furiosa has given up trying to stop him.


	9. Chapter 9

The next blocked area didn’t have a gap that went all the way through, and the third opened up to a single store that was half-flooded with rocks, the merchandise crushed underneath. The fourth, however, had a couple sizable gaps and another treasure trove of stores on the other side. Max walked eagerly along, taking stock of the stores again. Shoes, clothing, music, random technological gadgets…  
  
A sparkle caught his eye, and he turned across the hallway curiously and found himself faced with quite possibly the shiniest store to ever exist. It was decorated almost humorously lavishly, and the small flickering light of his lantern reflected off so many shiny surfaces that Max was dazzled. He stepped towards it. Baubles and beads hung from the ceiling, and the glass shelves were lined with many pieces of jewelry. A case of earrings sparkled marvelously as he walked by, and he fluttered up to a counter to inspect some shelves of necklaces and bracelets, all shining gold and silver, many of them set with rare stones.  
  
A voice in the back of his head reminded him that this stuff was all basically useless these days. Everything was worth something to somebody, of course, but these weren’t practical, and certainly didn’t have the value they did before the world fell.  The bird side of his brain, however, wanted to take each and every one back with him.  
  
He set his lantern down and scrabbled at the sliding door of one case, but it was firmly locked, and he pecked at the glass, but wasn’t exactly equipped to break into it. He tried a few other cases of the shinier selections, but all were locked. Finally he found a small display of simple charm bracelets with a drawer on the back that had no lock. He pecked through them and selected a few that had the more interesting charms on them, then scooped his beak underneath and slid them around his neck.  
  
Pleased with his new acquisitions (and happy that he hadn’t been in there quite so long that Furiosa had yelled at him yet), he finally turned to leave. He got distracted by particularly nice shines and sparkles several times on his way out, but eventually made it to the entrance, and tried to keep his back to the store, knowing he’d probably want to just head right back in if it caught his eye again. He moved to the next stores down the line. Candy store. More clothing. Mattresses. Those would be nice. If he ever turned human again, he would very much like to sleep on one that wasn’t just a cot or years and years past its lifespan. He sampled a pillow briefly, nestling into the squishiest one he could find and wishing suddenly he had the time for a quick nap.  
  
Onward. Sunglasses. Yet more clothing. More shoes. He circled around, trying again to keep his gaze away from the jewelry store, but found himself venturing in one last time on his way back, the voice in the back of his head cursing himself for being so mesmerized by such frivolous things.  
  
This time it was Furiosa’s voice that pulled him away again, and he reluctantly left, but not without a few sparkly earrings dangling off the handle of his lantern. He hopped his way up the rubble pile and headed back to Furiosa.  
  
“What do you have?” Furiosa squatted down to see the collection of bracelets around his neck as he approached, her expression already a little exasperated that he had picked up more useless trinkets. Max dipped his head to slide them off, then picked through until he found the one with the little truck charm, and offered it to her proudly. Her expression softened a little bit at his proffered gift, and she reached out to take it. It wasn’t anything she would ever use, and she was sure Max knew that, somewhere in his bird brain, but it was still hard to be frustrated at his behavior when he kept giving her things with such a well-meaning air.  
  
“Thank you, Max. It’s very pretty.”  
  
Max hummed contentedly.  
  


* * *

  
  
Furiosa debriefed Max in the council chambers, where he wrote a review of his discoveries at the buried mall across the table in chalk, shortening it as much as he could for his own sake, while trying not to leave anything important out. Furiosa wanted to know not just what he had found, but what he thought about the risks and benefits of digging each area out. Max told her that fully clearing the blockages would probably not be possible, but if they braced it well enough, they might be able to expand some of the gaps in the top enough for people to get through.  
  
(He also pointed out that he was still mad about the hot dogs.)  
  
Max had a headache and a neck ache by the end from writing so much, and decided he was really quite sick of not being able to talk. He never spoke much as a human, but you never learn to appreciate something more than when you no longer have it.  
  
He spent a chunk of the next day hiding himself away and trying to train his vocal chords into producing something that sounded like words. He knew from his attempts to speak when he first found Furiosa that he could produce a wide range of sounds, and he thought maybe, with enough work, he could learn to say something. But it was surprisingly hard to wrap his head around speaking without the ability to use lips and tongue to shape words like he could as a human.  
  
By the time the afternoon rolled around and Furiosa found Max and invited him to join her on her watch shift, his voice was tired and he had decided that maybe he would just forgo communication altogether. He had made do without hardly remembering how to speak before, why did he need to now?  
  
He watched the expanse of desert visible from the high watch post with Furiosa for a while, once pointing out to her an approaching vehicle in the distance. She flashed a message to a post down below with a mirror, and Max watched a small security convoy head out to meet the vehicle, then he went back to diligently scanning the desert. That was, until something skittered by in his periphery and he turned his head to find a frankly delicious-looking lizard climbing the wall nearby.  
  
Furiosa sighed and watched him out of the corner of her eye as he flew off to hunt it down. He was so easily distracted lately.  
  
She was staring through a pair of binoculars, searching the far reaches of the horizon when Max returned with his successful catch. It was big enough to share. He placed it proudly on the rock beside her and peered up at her. She didn’t notice him. He croaked quietly, but her only movement was to continue to scan the desert. He croaked again, a little hesitantly.  
  
“What?” she asked casually, not lowering the binoculars.  
  
Max huffed a short sigh and picked the lizard up, placing it on her knee. She looked down, the binoculars still held up to the horizon.  
  
“Is this for me?”  
  
Max traced a line across its stomach, indicating he wanted to split it.  
  
“That’s okay, I’m not hungry. Thank you, though.” He seemed to have forgotten again that she wasn’t fond of raw lizard.  
  
Max slowly took his meal back, a little dispirited. Well, more for him, he supposed. He pinned it with his foot as he tore into it hungrily. Furiosa grimaced a little bit and went back to her binoculars.   
  
Capable showed up some time later, apparently for no other reason than to spend time with Max and Furiosa as they kept watch. She was wearing the charm bracelet Max had picked out for her. He had chosen one for each sister, and had given them to them the previous night.  
  
She chatted for a while, mostly to Furiosa but occasionally asking Max a question, to which he would nod, shrug, shake his head, or croak in a way that neither of the women could quite decipher.  
  
When Max seemed especially focused on something going on on the ground far below them, Capable pulled Furiosa back a bit and lowered her voice. “Are you sure that’s Max?”  
  
Furiosa stopped. “Of course he’s Max. Who else would he be? He knows what Max knows.”  
  
“I know, but are you sure that’s _Max_? I mean inside his head. He’s not the same.”  
  
“What do you mean?” Furiosa looked a little fearful. She had also noticed he wasn’t quite the same Max she had known before, but had purposely tried to not give it too much thought. A lot had to change when a person was transformed into something else.  
  
“I mean he’s turning more bird than human,” Capable answered quietly.  
  
Furiosa looked over at him as he pecked at something at his feet, and thought about his collections of shiny but otherwise useless objects and the slight change in his demeanor. It was subtle at first, but Capable had apparently picked up on it too. There had been little things he had done over the last few days, things that had seemed odd at the time, but hadn’t been enough individually to really make her stop and think about it. She remembered him cawing reflexively in response when he heard another crow in the distance (afterwards he hadn’t really given her a straight answer when she asked if birds had a language he could understand now), and he was getting noisier lately, cawing repeatedly for no reason she could discern. Maybe he was trying to communicate somehow, but she couldn’t figure out what he wanted, and sometimes he would continue even when she directly asked him what he was doing. It wasn’t like how he had communicated before, with nuanced croaks and murmurs and grunts that usually carried at least a decipherable emotion behind them. It made no sense. It wasn’t like him.   
  
There were a couple of times when she had talked to him and he had just cocked his head at her with a blank expression, as if he didn’t quite understand. He also startled easily. He had always been a bit on edge, even as a human, but not this much. Now an unexpected wave of a hand could send him flying off. She felt like there was more; little things she couldn’t quite put a finger on, but he seemed more like an animal than he had initially. Maybe even more so than when they had first met and he had pointed a gun at her, grunting words as if they were nearly forgotten.  
  
“You think he might… get worse?” Furiosa finally asked. She always worried when he went out into the wastes that that would be the last time she might ever see him, but she thought now that watching him slowly fade out of existence, replaced by an unknown animal would be worse.  
  
“It’s only a couple more days until Cheedo will have been silent for seven days. If he turns back then, I think he’ll be okay. I hope he'll be okay... But if it doesn’t work… I don’t know…” Capable trailed off.  
  
“I wish I knew what was going on inside his head,” Furiosa murmured. Max, oblivious to their discussion, croaked to himself and adjusted his wings, tilting his head to look down at the ground far below him.


	10. Chapter 10

Furiosa hadn’t talked to him much that day. Of course, part of it had been because he had been hiding away, but even when he joined her on her watch shift, she hadn’t said much. That hadn’t really bothered Max; they shared a comfortable silence often, and more so now that he couldn’t speak, but it was after the watch shift that he sensed things had changed. She didn’t ignore him per se, but she asked him only questions that were necessary in the moment, and said nothing more than what needed to be said. She seemed uncomfortable, distracted. Something was wrong.  
  
They shared their evening meal in the Meal Hall, and Max watched her carefully. She was trying not to look at him, but after he stopped to peck at his food, he glanced back up to find her watching him worriedly. He croaked questioningly, but she simply shook her head and pulled her gaze away from him.  
  
She waited for him to finish his food, then waved him up to her shoulder, and headed back up to her room wordlessly. Max shifted his weight back and forth from foot to foot, unsure what was wrong or what he could do. He leapt off her shoulder once she closed the door to her room, but she didn’t take off her arm and hang it up like she usually did. She just sat down at her worktable and started tinkering with the parts she had laid out for a new arm design.  
  
Max walked quietly over to the table, then flapped up to perch on its edge. Furiosa looked up at him, offered an almost forced little smile, then turned her attention back to her hands, and said nothing.  
  
The silence that settled over them felt almost oppressive to Max. His wings twitched, but he pinned them back to his sides and watched her. She continued working. Max sighed internally. Well, if she wasn’t going to talk to him…  
  
“Uuuriosa.” It was hardly a word, even by his standards, but it was apparently recognizable enough. Furiosa’s brows rose suddenly, and she turned toward him, her hands frozen where they were working.  
  
“Did you just…?”  
  
Max bobbed his head, pleased that he had succeeded after he had nearly given up.  
  
“You can talk?” She sounded amazed.  
  
Max struggled to form another word. “Kinda.”  
  
“Why didn’t you before now?”  
  
His next response came out garbled a couple of times before he succeeded. “Learned today.”  
  
A smile spread across her face, and she turned her body to face him. “Max, that’s great!”  
  
Max croaked wordlessly and stepped toward her.  
  
“I’m glad I can stop guessing at what you’re trying to tell me,” she said, then added: “Well, more than usual.”  
  
In his head, Max was grinning.  
  
The elation of hearing his voice again (changed though it may have been) altered the uncomfortable mood for the rest of the evening, and Furiosa left her work forgotten as she talked to him, asking all the questions that had been burning in her mind but that she couldn’t ask before because either Max wouldn’t have been able to answer, or they hadn’t been dire enough to bother him with when he was writing in the council chambers. She was patient with Max’s slow, truncated answers; sometimes it took him a while to figure out how to form the words, and once he was sure he had gotten the main point across and she understood his meaning, he would often leave the rest of the sentence unsaid, if it was even a full sentence in the first place. She asked him to fill in all the gaps in what she knew, how he had gotten himself cursed, who it was that cursed him, how he had found his way back here, and what it was like being in a different body.  
  
Max didn’t have much of an answer to that last question. How did one explain something so incredibly alien? It was like explaining color to a blind person. “Weird” was apparently not enough of an answer for Furiosa, and she plied him with more questions.  
  
“What’s it feel like?” She specified.  
  
Max thought about that for a moment. He had gotten pretty used to it by now, but he remembered the strangeness of it at first. Half his face had felt like it was numb, with how little he could feel in his beak. He remembered the strange prickling feel of each individual feather as they were blown by wind, and the shock of the first time he had peered in the Interceptor’s side mirror. Learning to grip with his feet had been a strange experience, and at first it had felt like his arms were twisted and broken, despite the fact that that was how his wings naturally laid. He wasn’t really sure if he could summon the words to explain all that even if he were human. “Different. Strange. All wrong.” He spread a wing and then retracted it, and picked up one foot and curled his toes into a circle as if that might demonstrate.  
  
“Did transforming hurt?”  
  
He tilted his head as he considered it. That part had been a bit of a blur, but he didn’t remember any pain. “No. Just was like this. Sudden.”  
  
“Did you already know how to fly?”  
  
Max shook his head. “Took time. Crashed a lot.”  
  
Furiosa stifled a smirk. “How long did it take?”  
  
“Hours,” he admitted. He wasn’t going to detail all his crash landings.  
  
“And you came straight here.” She smiled faintly. “I’m glad.”  
  
Max gave a nod and a quiet hum.  
  
Furiosa only stopped asking Max questions after he had nearly stopped answering them, his voice too tired to form the words, his mind too overloaded with more social interaction than he had had in weeks. Maybe months.  
  
When they went to bed, it was late, and both were tired. Max picked at his cloth nest, arranging it around him before he tucked his head down and closed his eyes. He didn’t see the bit of worry that crept back across Furiosa’s face before she laid down beside him, wrapped herself in a blanket, and closed her eyes as well.  
  
The sky was only just starting to lighten with the promise of sunrise when Furiosa quietly pushed her blanket off herself and got up. She was trying to be careful and not wake Max, but he slept lightly, a habit picked up from years in the wastes, where any sound could mean his death. Max perked his head up and blinked tiredly as she stepped silently over to her workbench and sat down with a quiet sigh. She had already been up for nearly an hour, woken by a nightmare that had just circled in her head again and again as she had stared over at Max next to her pillow. She had dreamt of birds, of the crows that lived in the dead trees of what used to be the Green Place. She had been looking for Max, knowing he was one of them somewhere, but no matter what she did, no matter how much she called his name, she was only met by the caws and the wary stares of strange animals. Max was among them, but he wasn’t Max any longer.  
  
Max watched Furiosa for a moment as she set to work on her new arm again, then fluttered off the bed and walked across the floor, peering up at her. “Okay?” He asked simply.  
  
She turned to look at him as he flapped up to the edge of the worktable beside her. She took in a breath and let it out again. “I’m worried…”  
  
Max tilted his head at her with a curious expression.  
  
Furiosa looked at him for a long moment, not sure she wanted to say it out loud. Hearing him talk and knowing that there was still a human mind in there had eased her fears considerably, but the problem hadn’t necessarily gone away. The Max she knew was still with her, but just because he could talk now didn’t mean that it would stay that way. “You’ve been acting more and more like a bird…”  
  
For a brief moment, Max didn’t see what the problem was. He _was_ a bird, why shouldn’t he act like one? But then it struck him that that kind of thought was exactly what she meant. He wasn’t a bird, he was a man trapped in a bird’s body.  
  
He looked down at his feet quietly, and for the first time in days, they seemed strange to him, clawed, gangly things that weren’t his own. She was right, he realized. He had been acting like a bird lately. It was like there were two parts of him now. There was the part that was him, that wanted to be in a human body again, to drive and work with his hands and be able to hold a gun. Then there was the part of him that wanted to fly and nest and groom and was fascinated by small objects. He had hardly noticed it at first, just a little itch in the back of his brain, but he realized now that it had been getting stronger. Recently he had been acting on its impulses almost as much, if not more, than his human ones. He extrapolated just as Capable and Furiosa had done, and realized that this might not be just some harmless side effect.  
  
Max realized the longer he was silent, the more worried she was looking. “Bird. In my head,” he tried to explain. “Not me. Getting stronger. Louder.”  
  
They shared a worried look.  
  
“Can you… stop it? Push it back?” Furiosa tried.  
  
“Can try.”  
  
Furiosa nodded, though she didn’t look any less worried. “Couple days left,” she told him. “Just stick with us until then.”  
  
Max nodded.  
  


* * *

  
  
Max sort of regretted greeting Capable with a croaked “g’morning” when he and Furiosa spotted her in the Meal Hall at breakfast. She had stared in open-mouthed shock, which suddenly had turned into a grin and a shriek of “Max! You can speak!”  
  
That part wasn’t so bad. He only regretted his actions when, shortly before they had finished eating, Max found himself surrounded on the table by all his sisters plus the two old Vuvalini, all talking at once. Max couldn’t even make out half the questions in the cacophony around him.  
  
“What’s it like?”  
  
“Do you think differently?”  
  
“How did you learn to speak?”  
  
By the time Max had his neck scrunched up into his body in a gesture of overwhelmed intimidation, his eyes wide and zipping from one person to another, Furiosa finally interceded. “Okay, enough. Let’s take this somewhere else.” Other people in the Meal Hall were staring. She prodded Max until he came back enough to react and climb onto her arm, and they headed out, the whole posse in tow.  
  
Questions started coming to him again as they walked, but one at a time this time, and he answered them as best he could. They eventually ended up in the Sisters’ rooms simply because they were closest, and everybody sat down around a table to talk. Max stayed beside Furiosa, glad to be on the edge instead of the middle, though all eyes were still on him.  
  
“Okay, okay, go over the witch story. This I gotta hear,” Toast said eagerly.  
  
Max sighed. “Told you.”  
  
“Nah, you wrote like ten words. Tell us the whole thing!”  
  
Max grumbled, but proceeded to recount the story. Words were still difficult to form, but he was gradually getting better at it. He still shortened it quite a bit - there really wasn’t much to tell. She found him in a no-name town, followed him around like a beggar trying to gain his sympathy, and then asked him to drive her somewhere he had never even heard of. He had told her no, and the next thing he knew he was a raven.  
  
The women still were disappointed with the brevity of the story, but something seemed to occur to Dag after he finished, and she left the table briefly, returning with something clutched in her hand, a little smirk on her face.  
  
“Made this for you,” she said to Max, holding a little bag out to him. Max took it in his beak, laid it carefully on the table, and pecked at it curiously. It was a small fabric pouch with a flap top, and a few long ribbons of a mismatched cloth sewn onto the corners. Max tilted his head at it.  
  
“Here, spread your wings.”  
  
Max did as she requested and she reached over to place the bag on his back, and carefully looped the strips of cloth around his wings and tied them. Max folded his wings again, adjusting them a couple times until the straps settled comfortably, then he looked over his shoulder at the little backpack.  
  
“So you can carry around things you find,” Dag said. Furiosa shot her a look that said _don’t encourage that behavior_ , but Dag simply smiled at her innocently. “Or, you know, food, or… little tools?” She tried.  
  
Max ruffled his feathers happily and twisted his head around to adjust the pack on his back so he could reach it a little easier. “Thank you,” he croaked to Dag, who gave him a little smile. Behind his back, Furiosa shook her head with a quiet sigh, though a small smile was pulling at her mouth, too.  
  
Max looked at each person in the group around him, grateful for their care and acceptance of him. He stopped at Cheedo. A pang of guilt hit him suddenly again. It already wasn’t fair that she was the one working to lift his curse, and now it felt even less fair that he could talk freely while she was still bound to silence. He felt like he had had a connection with her over that, in their shared inability to speak, but now that was gone.  
  
But she was smiling at him proudly, and he ducked his head almost shyly. “Couldn’t say before,” he mumbled, taking a few steps toward her. “But thank you. Means a lot that you…” He left the rest unsaid; she understood. She pulled him into a gentle hug as he got closer, and he rested his head on her shoulder, humming contentedly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's the [last paragraph in adorable visual form](http://tinymammoth.tumblr.com/post/152346057384) for your enjoyment, courtesy of Tinymammoth. :D


	11. Chapter 11

Max wore his backpack the rest of the day, occasionally slipping small objects into it. He was as subtle as he could be about it, but as the bag got more full, the weight becoming noticeable on his back and the sides starting to fill out, he realized again that he was letting the bird control him. That wasn’t to say that he didn’t normally collect anything and everything he could out in the Wasteland, but generally they were practical things, not beetle shells and tiny, useless scraps of metal.  
  
He stepped away from the truck Furiosa was working on, hid himself behind a welder, and started emptying out his bag. It was a little hard to reach on his back, some of the objects escaping his grasp in the bottom of the bag, but he determinedly got them out one by one, left them in a pile on the ground, and forced himself to walk away. He wasn’t going to let a bird take over his mind if he could help it. Instead, he stopped by the tool box on his way back to Furiosa and picked out a few likely spanners, and slipped them in his bag to give her as she needed.  
  
He peeked under the truck as she rolled under it on a creeper. _Fixing cars_ , he thought. Fixing cars was a very human thing. He could do that.  
  
“Exhaust?” he asked, watching her feel her way down the exhaust pipe with her flesh hand.  
  
“Yeah, it’s leaking somewhere.” She rolled a little farther down and continued her search. Max ducked down and crawled underneath. He started at the other side of the dual exhaust system, scrutinizing the pipe, occasionally scratching his beak along the sides and top where he could reach but couldn’t see.  
  
The tip of his beak caught suddenly with a small crunch, and he poked at the spot, little bits of rust raining down his feathers. The pipe was already rough from a previous repair job, but there on the edge of the weld was a jagged hole.  
  
“Here,” he croaked, looking back at Furiosa. She let her hand fall and rolled over toward him as he stepped out of her way.  
  
“That would be it,” she said, feeling around the rusted spot. She checked up and down the pipe for similar spots, then looked for the best way to go about removing the exhaust pipe. She started to roll away, toward the toolbox, but he caught her sleeve in his beak to stop her, then turned his back, showing her the collection of tools sticking haphazardly out of the top of his pack. Furiosa huffed a little laugh and turned to pick through and grab the ones she needed. “Thanks.”   
  
Max hummed quietly.  
  
Every time he caught himself slipping after that, he’d try to do something human instead. He needed to stay himself, not turn into a bird completely. He remained hyper-focused on how he was acting, to the point that he became rather distracted by it.  
  
Max looked up from the small parts he was trying to sort on a worktable, suddenly aware of the sensation of being watched. He glanced over to find the round top of a pale, bald head, and two large eyes peering at him just over the edge of the table. Max blinked. What was a pup doing here? Or more accurately, where was the War Boy who was probably supposed to be watching him? A hand appeared over the edge suddenly, little fingers reaching for Max, and Max leapt away on instinct. The bottom lids of the eyes pushed very slightly upward, and Max could just imagine the pout hidden from view behind the table, and the little arm slid back down and away. Max watched warily.  
  
“There you are!” Capable appeared around the corner, a whole pack of pups in tow. “Come back and join the group, please.”  
  
The pup looked over his shoulder at Capable and the rest of his class, but then turned his attention back to Max and made no move to do as Capable had asked.  
  
Max looked at the kid in a way he hoped was stern (but really he had no idea what that would look like on his bird body), then clacked his beak and motioned toward the group of pups with it. The eyes blinked at him owlishly, then the pup slowly turned and followed the group, looking over his shoulder at Max more than where he was going.  
  
Capable was telling them about what went on in the garages and repair bays, that if they chose they could learn to fix and build cars when they were older, and could become blackthumbs. Max tried to go back to his sorting, but couldn’t help but be aware that more than a few of the pups were staring at him now.  
  
Capable eventually herded the group away to elsewhere in the garages, but it wasn’t too long before the lot of them came back through, this time in a rather more disorderly state. Two of them were crying, one on Capable’s hip, the other trailing behind her with his hand in hers. About half the others were following in a mostly well-behaved manner, while the other half ran about, playing, laughing, nearly knocking stuff over. Capable called out to them, trying to keep them under control, but not making much headway. She looked utterly exhausted.  
  
The group passed near Max’s alcove, and Capable lost about a third of them to the raven standing on the worktable. She didn’t even try to call them away. Instead she approached the table herself, looking a bit defeated. “Max. Can you help?”  
  
Max nodded, concerned about how worn out she looked, and stepped toward her, but immediately hopped back again as another little arm reached for him suddenly.  
  
The one Capable was carrying stopped crying in favor of staring at Max in wonder, and Capable put her down.   
  
“I signed up for more than I can handle.” She reached over the sea of heads that had gathered around the worktable and offered a hand to Max. He stepped carefully onto it. She lifted him above the reaching hands and turned to leave, and mercifully the entire group followed without a fuss.  
  
Capable breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you,” she murmured to Max.  
  
The group followed diligently behind her the rest of the way, and by the time she brought them back to what must have been serving as their classroom, she had collected herself again, and herded the kids into the room, doing a headcount as each went by.  
  
One of them stayed back and tugged at her shirt hem as she tried to get them all to sit in a circle on the floor. “Can we play with the bird?”  
  
She gave a small smile to Max. “I don’t think he’d really like that, but he is going to hang out with us for a little while.” She directed the boy back to the group, and set out a chair in front of them, and let Max perch on the back.  
  
“Everybody,” she called out when she had finally gotten most of them seated on the floor, “this is Max. He’s Furiosa’s friend.” He was a lot more than that, but Max understood that explaining to kids that she adopted a bird as a brother wasn’t going to go over very smoothly.  
  
The rest of the pups came and sat with the group, and Max tried not to be unnerved about the sea of eyes all staring at him.  
  
“He’s a kind of bird called a raven,” she continued to explain, and Max hummed a bit and settled down on the back of the chair. Apparently he was today’s new lesson.  
  
He tried to help out as much as he could, spreading his wings when she talked about them, cawing and supplying a few other sounds when she talked about that, and turning around to show them his backpack when she mentioned that he liked to be able to carry things around. The kids were enthralled.  
  
“Max, is it okay if they see your feathers up close?” Her voice was quiet, trying not to announce to the class in case he wasn’t comfortable with it. Max looked at them nervously, but nodded. They may be bigger than him (though not by as much as he would think - Max always forgot how big he was for a bird) but they probably weren’t going to hurt him.  
  
She smiled at him encouragingly. “Okay, everyone settle down, you’re going to get to look at his feathers now and see what I was telling you about.”  
  
Max hopped down to the seat of the chair, glanced about to make sure nobody was going to lunge at him, then hopped down to the floor and approached the group cautiously.  
  
“Be gentle,” Capable warned them, “he’s a living being just like you.”  
  
Max leapt back on reflex as a few tiny hands reached for him, but he forcibly kept himself from flapping away. They were just kids, he reminded himself, not the predator threats his stupid bird brain was telling him they were. He stepped forward again and spread a wing out so they could see his flight feathers. More kids scrambled nearer.  
  
“No, no, stay where you are. You’ll all get a turn to see,” Capable told them as Max tried very hard again to stuff instinct down and keep from flying away. The kids not immediately in front of him backed off, and Max held himself still as the others reached out curiously to touch his feathers.  
  
He moved through the group slowly, sometimes spreading one wing, sometimes spreading both so more kids could see at a time. Each reach toward him was an effort in telling his bird brain to shut up, sit down, and leave him alone. They weren’t threats, just kids. For the most part they were careful, and Max only had to shake off a couple untoward tugs to his wings. He waited patiently for one child to peek curiously in his backpack.  
  
“Food!” The kid exclaimed, pulling a half-eaten bit of ration square out of the pack and inspecting it.  
  
Capable laughed. “He likes to keep some with him in case he gets hungry.”  
  
Max carefully took the morsel back from the pup and tucked it into his bag again.  
  
He finished the rounds and Capable looked proud when he returned to the chair. He wasn’t quite sure of whom she was actually proud. He flapped up to the seat and turned to face the kids again.  
  
“Everybody say ‘thank you’ to Max for showing you his wings,” Capable directed.  
  
“Thank you!” They echoed back.  
  
Max would have smiled if he could.  
  
Capable moved on to reading to them from a torn up book, and Max stayed with her, perched on the back of the chair behind her. At the very least he was helping to hold their short attention spans so Capable could get through the rest of her day with as few headaches as possible. It wasn’t much, but it was something.  
  
When it came time for the evening meal and a few women and War Boys came to pick up the pups (one of whom insisted on giving Max a hug before she left), Capable visibly deflated. “Thank you,” she sighed to Max again, when the last of them were gone. “I took on Daphne’s class because she got sick last night, but I didn’t think it would be this much work.”  
  
Max murmured in quiet agreement. They had settled down reasonably well after he joined her, probably because none of them had ever seen such a big bird in their lives before, much less a friendly one up close, but he could see how the day would have gone for her without something to keep their attention.  
  
“C’mon,” she said, heading toward the door. “I’ve got some lizard jerky with your name on it.”  
  
Max hopped along after her.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much thanks to [SingleWhiteCatLady](http://archiveofourown.org/users/SingleWhiteCatLady/pseuds/SingleWhiteCatLady) for always throwing ideas at me, and helping me get un-stuck.

“Max! Max! It’s okay.”

Max awoke with a start, his beak open as he gasped for breath, his heart racing. He wasn’t sure where he was. He had just been in the wastes, hadn’t he? He looked around, disoriented.

“Hey. It’s okay. It’s not real.” Furiosa looked down at him calmly.

Max found her face in the dim light of the room and felt himself start to relax. It had just been a dream.

He had been caught in a hunter’s trap, fluttering frantically inside a steel box, ramming his head into the sides and top in panic. He had watched himself walk right into it, knowing full well what it was, but unable to stop himself. It was like he had been trapped inside his own skull, only able to watch as he zeroed in on the bait. Like he had taken a backseat in his own body, some mindless creature in control of his actions.

Max shook the images away. It wasn’t real. “Sorry. Woke you?” The sun was rising, but it was still early.

“It’s fine,” she replied, and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. “Wouldn’t mind getting an early start today anyway.”

She got up to change clothes, and Max quietly started to preen his feathers, rearranging all the ones that were sticking up wrong, but quickly stopped himself and let them be. He wondered if he had been flailing as badly as he had been in his dream. He grunted to try to clear the lump in his throat, and looked up as Furiosa was strapping her arm on.

She turned to open the door, motioning for him to follow, and he flew across the room and perched on her shoulder as she stepped out into the hallway.

“Nuh-uh,” she said, shoving him off her shoulder. “Today is day seven. I’m not having you sitting there if you’re going to turn into a human again.”

Max squawked quietly and fluttered to the floor. He couldn’t exactly argue with her reasoning, though. He hopped along after her, trying to keep up as she headed down to find some breakfast.

He tried to go about his day with Furiosa, but it was hard not to get anxious as the hours passed. Would he turn back? When? He tried not to think about if it didn’t work. He fidgeted, trying to sort tools while Furiosa worked, then just resorted to pecking at them and arranging them randomly on the floor.

“Max.”

Max stared at the tools at his feet, lost in thought.

“Hey, Max.” A foot nudged him, and Max finally looked up to see Toast standing over him, eyeing his sprawl of tools with a raised eyebrow.

“I think you need something to do. Come on.”

He tilted his head, but when she motioned for him to come, he quickly started grabbing the tools and piling them back into the toolbox from where he had gotten them.

“I’m borrowing Max,” Toast said loudly over her shoulder, presumably to Furiosa, as she started to walk away.

Max tried to finish cleaning up, but Toast was already leaving him behind, so he shoved the last few tools in the general direction of the toolbox and spread his wings to fly after her.

“Mind a little garden work?” Toast asked when he caught up and landed to hop along beside her. “Dag needs the extra help today. She started noticing some bugs on the crops yesterday. Says she wants all available hands getting rid of them before they do too much damage.”

Max croaked a sort of non-answer. Pest control didn’t sound like a particularly fun task, but a part of himself he wasn’t sure he wanted to listen to pointed out that he was getting kind of hungry…

She led him up to the top of the Citadel and into the gardens. Max followed curiously as she approached a row of tomato plants and dug through the leaves a moment.

“These,” she said, holding a small black beetle between her fingers for him to see. Max leaned in and inspected it, gave a nod of acknowledgement, then snatched the beetle from her, crunched it in his beak, and swallowed it down.

Toast snatched her hand back, surprised, then her face wrinkled up in faint disgust. “Ugh, you don’t have to eat—“ She cut herself off as Max blinked at her almost cluelessly. “You know what, fine. Whatever works for you.” She shook her head and turned back toward the plants. Max hopped over to the other side of the row and started searching for more morsels. He snapped them up one by one, and decided that this wasn’t such a bad task after all.

Eventually Toast moved on to a different row of plants, but Max continued his work where he was. The beetles weren’t very big, and there weren’t a ton of them, but he figured he could get a meal’s worth in if he kept at it.

His meal was interrupted suddenly by the blaring of horns, first from one of the Citadel’s watch towers, then echoed by the others. Max looked up and around, alarmed. 

Toast leapt up from where she was working on the next row over and ran to the nearby edge of the spire they were on. Max followed and peered out into the desert.

“Attack,” Toast said grimly. Max glanced up at her, then toward the horizon where she was looking. A small cloud of dust rose in the west, the kind Max knew could only be kicked up by a party of vehicles on the move.

“We have to get ready.” Toast was suddenly dashing away toward the steps that led down from the garden, and Max scrambled into the air to follow after her.

“It’s bad?” He asked her simply after he had caught up and perched on her shoulder.

“Those horns are only used if the watches spot a war party. We’ve got maybe half an hour before they’re here.”

The Citadel was abuzz with activity, people running here and there, arming themselves, finding strategic positions. The lifts were working full-tilt to bring as many people up from the ground as possible, and many others down below scrambled into hidden holes in the ground so as not to be caught in the battle to come.

Toast headed straight to the armory, where she took over supervising what weapons and ammunition got handed out to whom, barking orders for certain locations to be covered. Max perched on a crate beside her and fidgeted nervously. The familiar adrenaline of an expected battle was starting to get to him, though he knew he couldn’t take up a gun to help. He glanced over his shoulder at the arms and ammunition that were quickly disappearing from the store room. A War Boy picked up one crate of hand-made explosives to take with him, uncovering another crate below it. Max stared at the grenades packed in neat rows.

He hopped over to the edge of the crate he was on and prodded at Toast’s arm, then flapped his wings impatiently as she finished handing out some guns to a few more people who had volunteered to fight.

“What?” She looked down at him, placing her hands on her hips.

“Those,” he said, nodding his head toward the box of grenades quickly. “I can use them.”

“We can’t use such big explosives around the Citadel. We’d risk damaging the buildings below or hurting the people who might be hiding there.”

“No. Before they get here. Can pick some off.”

Toast’s eyes lit up for a moment with the possibilities, but then she thought about it and shook her head. “I can’t let you do that. If they realize you’re the one dropping them, they could shoot you right out of the sky.”

Max grunted. “Take risks in battle.”

She leaned down toward him and lowered her voice. “Max, you could turn human any minute. What if you’re out there flying when—“

Max’s feathers fluffed out in anger. “People will die when they get here,” he interrupted.

Toast closed her mouth against what she was saying. She looked to the grenades, then to Max, and back, hesitated a bit longer, then spoke. “How many can you carry at once?”

Max considered it. “Maybe four.”

Toast quickly snatched four of the grenades, ordered a War Boy to take her place, and hurried out of the room with Max scrambling after her once again. There was a door to the outside not far away, and she stopped just behind the snipers perched there and looked back at Max. “You sure?”

Max nodded, and indicated the straps of his backpack. “Two here.” 

Toast hooked a grenade onto each strap under his wings, and he gripped the other two with his feet. He gave Toast a nod, and hefted himself into the air. It was a heavy load, and the two under his wings made it a little harder to flap, but at least he was airborne, and by the looks of it wouldn’t have far to fly now.

The doubts in the back of his mind about making the first strike against a group with unknown intention were cleared when he saw the bristling guns mounted on the vehicles, and the men already hanging out of windows and perched on top of vehicles with weapons ready. They weren’t here to make trade agreements, that was for sure.

He tried to plan where best to strike them as he approached, but he didn’t have much time, and he would probably only get a couple passes before they spotted him. He didn’t know how quickly they would identify him as an attacker after the explosions started, but didn’t particularly want to risk giving them much of a chance. At least the war party was in a fairly tight formation.

He swooped low at the last minute and pulled the pin on one of the grenades under his wing just before he passed the lead vehicle. It unhooked from the strap as the lever released, and fell away from him. Max didn’t wait, but immediately pulled the pin on the second one as he passed over the center of the group of vehicles and let that one fall away too. He swooped to the side and dropped low to the ground as he came about to try to keep up with the cars.

The explosions happened in quick succession, taking out two of the vehicles and causing one more to crash in their wake. The others swerved around the destruction, and the convoy hesitated, but another vehicle quickly took the lead and the party continued toward the Citadel.

Max stayed low to try to avoid being spotted as he flew alongside them. The momentary confusion and change of leadership was just enough to get him ahead of them, but he’d have to act quickly if he wanted to hit them again. He swung to the side again and climbed quickly as he approached the convoy’s flank. He pulled the pin of his third grenade and dropped it as he passed over the edge of the war party, but mis-estimated, and the explosion fell back behind the racing vehicles, and they quickly left him behind.

Max turned back toward the Citadel and flapped like his life depended on it. They weren’t far now, and as the war party reached the base of the Citadel, they slowed to climb the narrow path into the center of the spires. Max knew he shouldn’t use the last grenade this close to the buildings that lined the road they were now on, but if he could just take out a few more of their attackers, it would mean that much less damage they could do in their attack. As he caught up, he picked out one vehicle with an open hatch on the roof, and he zeroed in on it. He landed on the roof just long enough to pull the pin and drop the last grenade neatly into the hatch, then took off and darted for the nearest mud-and-brick building for cover. Bullets struck the wall right beside him as he dove into a window and ducked down for the explosion as it shook the surrounding buildings.

He hurried through the building and flew out a window in the back, trying to stay out of sight. Bullets were starting to fly between the vehicles and the walls of the Citadel now, but it wasn’t far up to the door he had left through, where he found Toast picking off attackers alongside two other gunmen. He perched at her feet and turned his attention to the battle below.

If there were still people of the Citadel down on the ground, they were well-hidden, and the attackers didn’t seem interested in the buildings anyway. They knew that the power of the Citadel was in the towers above.

“They’ve got some kind of armor,” Toast growled, shooting at one attacker for the fourth time and not bringing him down. Max stepped nearer the edge and looked over carefully. By the looks of it a number of the ones that had left the cover of the vehicles were taking hits that didn’t seem to be stopping them. Ten or so that Max could see stepped up to the walls of the citadel, and one by one fired grappling hooks at the stone above them. Those that found a sturdy anchor started to climb.

“Shit.” Toast aimed at one climbing the spire opposite, but the bullets barely seemed to bother him. “I need bigger rounds.”

Max watched one whose hook had anchored near an opening in the side of the Citadel fall back to the ground as his rope was cut. “Knife.” He looked up at Toast.

“What?”

“Knife. I can cut the ropes.”

“If you go out there…”

Max glared and she cut herself off. They just had this discussion. If he could help in any way, he didn’t see why she should be stopping him.

Toast chewed at her lip and looked back toward the men slowly climbing the walls. Another had fallen by someone else’s hand, but the rest had their hooks anchored somewhere where nobody inside the Citadel could get to them. She pulled the knife from her belt and crouched down to hold it out to Max. Max grabbed it in his beak and hurried back out the open doorway.

He stuck close to the walls, though he knew they would provide little cover from the rain of bullets coming from the vehicles at the base of the Citadel, or a missed shot from the Citadel’s walls. He hurried toward the nearest climber, found a place to perch a few feet below where the hook was anchored, and started hacking at the rope with the knife in his beak.

He cut one down, then found a second. He jumped instinctually away as bullets hit the wall near him, but shook his head and focused back on his task until the rope was cut. Two down. By the time he went looking for a third, he noticed there were no more climbers on the ropes. Attackers fled back to the cars, and the few that hadn’t been hit by War Boy lances turned and hurried back out the way they came. Cheers rose up from the walls of the Citadel. Max stopped on a ledge and blinked, confused.

That seemed too easy.


	13. Chapter 13

Toast and Max met up with the others in the council chambers that evening as the rest of the Citadel set to work cleaning up the damage done. Relief filled Furiosa’s face as she saw him, but then a look of worry overtook it again.  
  
“You’re still a bird,” she said quietly as he flew and perched beside her. Her fingers reached to touch his feathers.  
  
Max nodded and returned her look of worry. They had all hoped he would turn back in the afternoon, exactly seven days after Cheedo had stopped talking for the second time. He held out hope that a bit more time would do it. Maybe by morning. But he couldn’t stop the dread that crept through him at the thought that maybe by breaking Cheedo’s silence once, his curse could never be undone. It was his own damn fault. He looked at Cheedo and shared a look of worry with her as well. She still stayed silent, however, and Max decided that if he hadn’t changed back by morning, he would ask her to give up. She had done enough for him.  
  
As the last of the people gathered and sat down around the table, Furiosa stood up to speak to the council. “We’re here to discuss this attack. There’s a lot of cleanup that needs to be done, and we still don’t know who they were or what they wanted. I’m sure some of you also noticed how strange the attack was.”  
  
Max nodded. “Was too easy.”  
  
Furiosa returned the nod. “Those men were armored, and half way up our walls when they just gave up.”  
  
“They might not have expected to be losing so many in the attack,” Capable said.  
  
“Possible, but our reputation is well-known,” Furiosa responded. “You don’t attack the Citadel without knowing it’s going to be hard.”  
  
The doors beside them burst open suddenly, and two men charged in. Max jumped at the noise and took to the air on instinct, but forced himself to come back, and landed on Furiosa’s shoulder a moment before she froze, a gun pointed to her head. The second man snatched Cheedo from her seat and pulled her back with him, a knife to her throat. Even in this situation, she managed to remain completely silent, and Max’s heart felt like it would tear open as he met her fearful eyes.  
  
“Nobody move,” the one with Cheedo in his grip growled at the council members around him. Toast froze with her hand hovering just over her gun.  
  
Max’s eyes darted back and forth between the knife in the man’s hand and the gun in the other’s.   
  
The other was looking only at Furiosa, his eyes drifting to her arm, then back up to her face. “You’re in charge here?”  
  
Furiosa held her tongue against correcting him. The entire council was in charge, but she knew she had a certain reputation outside of the Citadel, and she wasn’t about to give him a reason to try to shoot everybody in this room. Max felt her muscles tense under his feet, just slightly, as the man’s grip on his gun tightened.  
  
He was going to shoot her. They were going to hurt everybody here.  
  
Max launched himself off Furiosa’s shoulder and straight toward the gun. He rammed into it, knocking the man’s aim off just a moment before he fired a shot into the wall, then went for the man’s face, talons extended. In a flurry of feathers, he gave him one good scratch, then flung himself at the man who held Cheedo. Furiosa was right behind him, moving on his distraction to take out the man with the gun.  
  
Max went straight for the other man’s hand, digging his beak into the flesh of it. The man screamed as the knife fell from his grip, and he flung Cheedo aside, freeing his other hand to try to fight off the bird that was now flapping in his face. Max scratched and pecked furiously, until one of the swinging hands caught him around the neck and the man flung him swiftly into the wall. Max hit it hard, his back and head colliding with the stone with a thud. He fell to the ground, limp and unmoving.  
  
The man clawed briefly at the blood running into his eyes, then kicked at Max, sending him into the wall again before Toast stopped him in his tracks with a gun aimed at his head.  
  
“Move and you’re dead,” she snarled.  
  
Furiosa dropped the unconscious man who had just a moment ago been holding a gun on her, and pointed the weapon at the second man. She glanced down at Max’s unmoving body, then flicked her eyes over toward the council table. “Somebody get him to Medical. Now.”  
  
Dag rushed around the table and carefully scooped Max up before she hurried out of the room.  
  
“And someone get some more security in here. I want these two locked up for questioning.”  
  
Capable hurried out of the room next, and Furiosa stared down the man in front of her, venom in her gaze.  
  
She and Toast stayed only as long as it took to get the two infiltrators locked up securely, and then both hurried up to the Medical room. Dag, Capable and Cheedo were already there, standing back and watching anxiously as Nida, one of the old Vuvalini, leaned over Max’s still form on one of the bed ledges. The real beds, what few of them they had, were filled with people injured during the attack, but she had laid a folded blanket on the stone for Max.  
  
Furiosa stepped up to the ledge and dropped to her knees beside it.  
  
Nida looked up and over at Furiosa briefly, taking in the fear on her face. “He’s alive, but I can’t say much more than that.” She put an old stethoscope to his chest and listened for a minute. “I just don’t know enough about birds to tell how he’s hurt. I’ll keep him under close observation. Hopefully he’ll come around on his own.”  
  
Furiosa gave a stiff nod and stared down at him for a minute. He suddenly looked so small and frail, lying on his side, his wing limp across his body. She took a breath and stood up. “Have somebody come find me if anything changes.” She had work to do. Even with those two men locked up, the Citadel wasn’t necessarily out of danger. Any number of others could have gotten in, and she intended to find out how and how many. She gave Toast a nod as she walked back out, and Toast fell in line beside her.  
  
  


* * *

  
Capable and Cheedo took turns sitting by Max and watching for any change in his condition. Dag went to fetch some herbs she thought might wake him up, but even their potent scent didn’t cause him to stir. Hours passed, and by the time Furiosa returned, well after dark, Nida had already chased the other women off and told them to get some sleep. “He’s stable. There’s nothing we can do but wait.”  
  
Furiosa stopped briefly where Max lay, long enough to see for herself that he was still breathing, then crossed the room to where Nida sat, looking over some biology texts and books on birds she had had one of her aides scrounge up.  
  
“Entirely unhelpful,” she muttered, closing one book with a snap. She turned at Furiosa’s footsteps, and motioned her over.   
  
Furiosa leaned back against Nida’s worktable. “How is he?”  
  
“Still breathing, at least. His pupils are the same size, that’s about the only way I’d know to check for a head injury in a bird. If he’s got anything broken, I can’t tell.” Nida sighed.   
  
Furiosa stared across the room silently.  
  
“Saw them turning this place upside down a while ago,” Nida said, looking to distract Furiosa from her worries. “Is everything okay?”  
  
“People snuck in with the citizens we brought up from the ground before the attack. The war party was just a diversion to get them up here.” Furiosa’s voice was flat and tired, but she finally looked away from Max. “We found five more. I think that’s all of them, but Toast has security on high alert for a while.”  
  
“They were after you,” Nida said.  
  
Furiosa waved off her concern. “I’ll be fine.” Her eyes turned back to Max, and Nida gave up.  
  
Furiosa stayed as the hours passed, and Nida knew better than to try to make her leave. When Furiosa got agitated enough to start pacing up and down the room, Nida tried to push her over to the ledge across from Max’s to get some rest, but Furiosa refused.  
  
When Max finally did wake and start to move, Furiosa was beside him in an instant. Max blinked at her dazedly and without recognition, and for a terrifying moment Furiosa wasn’t sure if the man she knew was actually in there anymore.  
  
“Dizzy,” he croaked out, and Furiosa almost grinned in her relief.  
  
“Can you move?” She kept her voice low so as not to aggravate the splitting headache he probably had. “Is anything broken?”  
  
Max moved faintly, pulling his wing closer to his body and flexing his feet. “Chest hurts.” He torqued his head to look up as Nida approached.  
  
“Yeah, well, you were thrown into a wall and then kicked,” the old Vuvalini pointed out as she knelt beside the ledge.  
  
Max grunted. He tried to push himself up, but Nida put a hand to his side and gently pushed him back down.  
  
“Take it easy, boy. You’ve been out for hours.” She clicked on a small flashlight and flashed it in one eye, then turned his head and checked the other.   
  
Max squinted and blinked, then let himself fall back onto the blanket. “‘M still a bird?”  
  
“Still a bird,” Furiosa answered quietly, and Max closed his eyes and took in a deep breath.   
  
“We’ll figure something out,” Furiosa said quickly. “Even if we have to go find the woman who cursed you.”  
  
“Mm.”  
  
“Both of you need rest,” Nida said sternly. She folded the end of the blanket up over Max, covering him to his chest, then herded Furiosa back over to the ledge she had tried to get her to sleep on earlier. “You can stay here as long as you’re resting. If I see you up pacing again, I’m kicking you out.”  
  
Furiosa grumbled, but sat down on the ledge and unstrapped her arm before she lay down. She watched Nida go back to check on some of her other patients, then looked back over at Max. He was already asleep again. Reluctantly, she let herself drift to sleep as well, and eventually even Nida, satisfied that all her patients were fine and resting, left to sleep in her study adjacent to the Medical room. The night drew on.  
  
The silence of the room was suddenly broken by a quiet “shit—“ followed by a short, scrabbling scrape and a thud, and Furiosa was awake in an instant.   
  
Max was lying, fully human, in a pile on the floor. She stared almost disbelievingly. After a moment, he pushed himself up slowly, and sat back against the ledge he had just fallen off of. He put his hand to his split lip, and looked around, confused and ruffled.  
  
“Max!” Furiosa hurried over to him and knelt beside him, a smile spreading across her face. “It worked!”  
  
Max blinked at her, then pulled his hand away from his mouth and looked down at it as if he hadn’t noticed it before. He curled his fingers and spread them again, and then a smile slowly crept across his own face. He looked down at himself, patted down the front of his jacket, and looked up at Furiosa. His smile grew wider as he took in the relief on her face.  
  
She gripped the back of his head suddenly, and their foreheads conked together. Max’s hand fumbled up, finding the back of her head and the soft fuzz of her hair, and he pressed close, a smile still on his face.  
  
“Glad to have you back, Max.”  
  
“Never went anywhere,” he responded, his voice finally the rough rumble she was used to.  
  


* * *

  
  
The first sound Cheedo made when she realized she no longer needed to stay silent was a squeal of delight as she threw her arms around Max. Max hid a wince at the pain in his chest, but he was smiling as he pulled her tight against him.  
  
“Owe you one,” he murmured when she released him and stepped back to look him over.  
  
She shook her head. “That’s just what family does.”  
  
Max looked around at the other women surrounding him. Every one of them was smiling, and he was struck again by the fact that there were people in this world who actually cared about him, who worried over him and were glad that he was okay. It was still a strange feeling to him.   
  
He looked down at the floor and mumbled around his difficulty finding words. “Is it, um… okay if I stay?” He asked quietly.  
  
He didn’t think any of the smiles around him could have gotten any bigger, but they did.

**Author's Note:**

> [Corvus cormax in gif form!](http://incredisturbeepy.tumblr.com/post/140913009408/ravenmax-au-for-thatonezombiecosplayers-corvus)  
>  And some [unrelated raven!Max art](http://icarus-doodles.tumblr.com/post/152451474087).


End file.
